ABSTRACT
A listener to any of these works who does not know Smalley's pre Piano Concerto corpus might well conclude that he was intent on a kind of musical time-travelling, of journeying back to the early twentieth century and re-inventing in his own terms the response of figures such as Schoenberg and Bartók to the nineteenth-century tradition, bracketing out in the process most of what had occurred in the subsequent years of the twentieth century, his own earlier music included. But the musical language of the works discussed in this chapter would have been impossible without Smalley's Stockhausen-inspired adventures of late 1960s and early 1970s. Having based a number of works on Chopin Mazurkas, Smalley drew subsequently on some other well-known nineteenth-century composers: Schumann's Humoresque op. 20 forms the basis of the Cello Concerto using similar techniques, while Brahms provides material for the Trio for clarinet, viola, and piano of 1992-99 and the piano quartet Crepuscule of 1998-99.
