In 1953, Samuel Barber received a commission from the Detroit Chamber Music Society for a work for the symphony orchestra’s first-chair players. The commission would commemorate the orchestra’s tenth season.
The summer of 1954 found Barber working on the opening scene of his Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, Vanessa. In Maine, a performance of the New York Woodwind Quintet impressed him, and he asked if he could soon show them part of a new sextet(!) he was composing. Though he visited them in New York the next January, it was not until the summer of 1955 that he notified them of his new woodwind quintet, which they read for him in November. Flutist Samuel Baron reported in his journal, “We were completely gassed! What a wonderful new quintet conception….The piece is very hard, but so far it sounds just beautiful to us.” The New York ensemble wished to play it, but Barber reserved the premiere (March 20, 1956) for the Detroit group by whom it was commissioned.
Afterwards, Summer Music became the domain of the New York Woodwind Quintet, which helped Barber polish the music and performed it extensively in locations as diverse as Boston and South Africa (15 performances). In a review of that ensemble’s 1959 recording of Summer Music, Oliver Daniel praised Barber’s work as “a soothing contract to the more naughty world of many of his dodecaphonic confrers…its title is apt and the seeds of lyricism here are more those of a summer’s languor than of academic agitation.”
Cast loosely as a rondo, Summer Music’s single movement stands apart in the woodwind quintet literature. Although it owes something to the 20th century neo-classic French approach to woodwind writing (e.g., Jen Francaix) Barber’s music has a unique rhapsodic character that reflects his romantic personality. In an interview about Summer Music, Barber was adamant that its languor should not be interpreted as sluggishness:
“It’s supposed to be evocative of summer –summer meaning languid, not [clapping hands loudly] killing mosquitos…but all I can say about Summer Music is that everybody plays it too slowly which leads certain charming colleagues of mine to come up with real mean remarks. Two of them…once told me they heard a performance that dragged so, it should have been called Winter Music.”
Program notes by © Michael Fink 2025