Review

William Osborne
Music for the End of Time:

Mindlheim, , Germany
Publisher: Polymnia Press
Date of Publication: 2007

Score, part, compact disc, and digital video disc

Primary Genre: Solo Tenor Trombone - with media

William Osborne studied with George Crumb for five years in Philadelphia and New York, and with Franco Donatoni for two years in Rome. He has received two ASCAP awards, a Doctoral Fellowship to Columbia University, alternate to the American Rome Prize, and a major prize from the Theater Commission of the City of Munich for his Beckett productions. He founded The Wasteland Company in 1984, along with his trombonist wife Abbie Conant, to explore women's roles in Music Theater. In recent years they have toured, to great critical acclaim, with his compositions to over 140 cities in America and Europe. He has also written numerous scholarly articles about women in music, music sociology and philosophical/theoretical concepts.

Music for the End of Time is a 50 minute multimedia work for solo trombone, video and quadraphonic electronics based on the Book of Revelation. The work was written for and premiered by Abbie Conant in 1998. There are six movements, performed without pause:

I. A Door Was Opened in Heaven, Rev. 4:1.
II. The Sea of Glass, Rev. 4:6.
III. The Four Horsemen, Rev. 9:17.
IV. As It Were A Trumpet Talking, Rev. 4:1.
V. The White Beast, Rev. 6:8.
VI. A Woman Clothed With the Sun, Rev. 12:1.

Although not ideal, the composer does not object to performances of individual movements. It is also possible to perform the work without the video.

The composer states some of the philosophical underpinnings of this work:
     We were drawn to the Book of Revelation more by its rich imagery and symbolism than any sort of doctrinaire religious belief. At times, St. John's writing is quite transcendental, but at others, its embittered visions are almost insanely horrific.
…On one hand, these visions have helped humans appreciate the extreme limitation of our existential condition in relation to the boundless majesty of the universe. But apocalyptic visions can also lead to misappropriated notions of divine justice, or even divine wrath that are anything but transcendental. Such visions are often not divine at all, but rather very human expressions of contempt and hatred for those we ourselves deem unworthy. In a world that seems to increasingly reflect imperialistic hubris, and in a world with increasing beliefs about the divinity of murdering others, the dangers of misappropriated apocalyptic visions should not be underestimated. 
…Through the apocalyptic …we learn that in the infinite expanse of this world, our human passions are often the sheerest folly, and that the truest path to justice is through forgiveness, compassion and love. … The ultimate value of transcendental experience might be that it shows us that nothing is more precious or transcendent that the simple beauty of life itself.

From a technical standpoint this work requires a virtuoso trombonist, a first class quadraphonic sound system and a digital video projector. The beautiful and relevant still images, selected from digital paintings by Norbert Bach, were transformed into motion using various video-graphic techniques. With its philosophical underpinnings, this is a major opus in the grand romantic tradition, utilizing the language of our time. Like the works of one of his mentors, George Crumb, the musical style is eclectic, with tonality, atonality, traditional performance practices, dance rhythms, quotations, experimental sounds, etc., all fused to create a powerful theatrical experience.  There is nothing like it in the trombone repertoire. This is for performers of exceptional skills looking for challenging, serious, and meaningful repertoire. 

-Karl Hinterbichler
University of New Mexico