Short Developments

Short Developments
Composed by Mathias Ruegg (April 1996)
for Woodwind Quintet
Published by Doblinger
Includes score and parts

Instrumentation: Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Horn in F, and Bassoon

This woodwind quintet was commissioned by the Swiss ensemble Opus Novum, whose members went on to produce a perfect recording of it. It contains virtually everything that extended jazz structures can do, rhythmical, virtuosic sections alternate relatively regularly with lyrical ones. In terms of style I would file it somewhere between Stravinsky and Richie Bairach. The most beautiful misappropriation of the piece happened in the 1990s, when it appeared in a TV commercial for coffee, in which the feared German Burgtheater director, Claus Peymann, drank coffee and praised Vienna – two real opposites (paymann and “praising Vienna”) resolved by the coffee house. A symbol for this city, whose main motto is “Vienna is different”. And although Vienna is “different” I love to live in this city since 1977, in a city which gave birth to not an unimportant part of modernism at the start of the previous century; one encounters traces of this at every corner. And I have been fortunate enough to experience the awakening of the city from its long sleep, its development from a stuffy nursing home to a seemly young metropolis full of life. Short, but effective developments.
– Mathias Ruegg – Vienna, March 2011