Zones of Blue (US Premiere)

Jazz is awash in shades of blue — fittingly, since the Black American art form known as the blues was among the chief components in its making. The lexicon of jazz titles follows suit, from “Fats” Waller’s “Black and Blue” through John Coltrane’s Blue Train, right up to Cassandra Wilson’s Blue Light ’til Dawn. And prior to even the earliest of those cited examples, there was Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin’s 1924 fusion of jazz verve and European classical music.

Zones of Blue, a new rhapsody for clarinet and orchestra by Austrian com-poser Olga Neuwirth, is not explicitly derived from jazz, yet jazz is foundational to the work. At its core, it is an elegy honoring Neuwirth’s late father, Harald Neuwirth, an eminent jazz pianist and composer who died in March 2023. An accomplished pianist who was performing Mozart concertos by age 12, Harald performed regularly with some of Europe’s leading improvisors and collaborated with American artists like Art Farmer and Lee Konitz. He also played a prominent role in education, teaching in the Institute for Jazz at the Graz Academy of Music from its founding in 1965.

Olga, for her part, played trumpet in her youth, claims Miles Davis among her chief inspirations, and created an opera inspired by the iconic jazz singer Billie Holiday. She composed Zones of Blue for Jörg Widmann, the German composer, conductor, and clarinetist to whom it is dedicated.

Despite quoting nearly outright the signature rising clarinet glissando of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue just before the two-minute mark, Zones of Blue alludes to jazz fleetingly and obliquely. The ambiguity and tension that result are qualities that permeate the oeuvre of Neuwirth, a feverishly inventive composer whose surreal, even macabre works position her as spiritual kin to uncompromising visionaries like Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, and David Lynch, whose feature film Lost Highway — which Neuwirth adapted into an opera — centers on an avant-garde jazz saxophonist.

Opening with the spare sound of human breath rising and falling, Zones of Blue proposes a fantastical soundscape, across which the solo clarinetist murmurs, growls, and shouts as if embroiled in internal debate and emotional turmoil — effects Neuwirth notates and describes in exacting detail. A piano tuned in microtones provides another striking sound texture and is especially notable during an exposed passage accompanied by throbbing basses and rumbling drums, one of several episodes that evoke an oblique sort of swing.

Any allusion to jazz aside, the title Zones of Blue was partly inspired by “Blue Song,” a long-lost poem written by the young Tennessee Williams. The unpublished work was discovered in 2005, scribbled on the back of a booklet Williams had used for a Greek exam while enrolled at Washington University in 1937. Neuwirth includes two passages from the poem as a preface to her score, and has emphasized the final stanza in particular:

I am tired. I am tired of speech
and of action. In the heart of me
you will find a tiny handful of
dust. Take it and blow it out
upon the wind. Let the wind have
it and it will find its way home.

Williams’s description of dust blown from a hand into the wind enhances and complicates the breathy sounds Neuwirth employs in her score. The poem’s tone of resignation and longing serves to underscore a work that serves at once as public homage and private elegy — the kind of layered nuance that runs throughout this composer’s complex yet immediately expressive music.

— Steve Smith

Steve Smith is a writer and editor based in New York City. He has written about music for The New York Times and The New Yorker, and served as an editor for the Boston Globe, Time Out New York, and NPR.