Programme Note
It is a short, lyrical, and introspective piece, involving the orchestra and some offstage players. The onstage orchestra plays a long choral-like passage, answered by short fanfare elements. Later the offstage players take up these fanfare elements, and the ensemble builds to a peak before resolving into a gentle setting of Schubert’s masterly song An die Musik (hence the title of the work), form which all the earlier fanfare elements were taken.
--John Corigliano