Lost Anthems
Scott Wollschleger wrote Lost Anthems as part of The 20/19 project, violist Leilehua Lanzilotti’s commissioning enterprise. The twenty five minute work is divided into fifteen discrete sections, what Wollschleger describes as “a melodic, song-like structure in search of itself.” By titling the works “anthems,” Wollschleger invokes a music that is inherently communal and symbolic of something larger than itself; by presenting music that is often introspective, he subverts the bombastic underpinnings of many anthems.
Composer Scott Wollschleger writes that Lost Anthems initially had as its subtitle “Songs intended to bring people together but after there are no people left to bring together,” though he ultimately decided to forego its inclusion. Putting aside that this album is being released at a moment when we are still here, presumably open to be brought together, Lost Anthems is permeated throughout with a kind of alienated tenderness that suggests nostalgia experienced in a hollowed out version of our world.
The work is composed of fifteen sections, or anthems, that explore contrasting timbral languages and “time-feel bubbles.” The expansion of sonic resources, both through the use of keyboard preparations and extensive playing inside the piano and in the incorporation of a rich suite of extended viola techniques, are a key component of how Wollschleger delineates these fields of material. In fact, they exist in the piece as constellations of a sort, moving between each other without transitions, almost like tableaus of color arranged around a sonic gallery.
The library of expression that violist Leilehua Lanzolotti and pianist David Kaplan realize from Wollschleger’s score is vast. Ethereal high register viola lines are supported by bell-like, widely spaced piano sonorities. Sinister, gnawing ostinati feature inside-the-keyboard plucked pitches and over-pressure viola drones. Delicate ponticello tremolandi and circular fortspinnung in the viola emerge and recede, while the piano plays luminous harmonics. Despite the overall frame of introspection, Lost Anthems also contains vigorous music, like the raw, undulating bending figure in the viola that is punctuated by chords in alternating registers and followed by a mechanistic, toggling ensemble machine that exploits the percussive timbres of the physicality of the piano.
A few minutes after the midway point of the work, the piano is left alone to tap out a Morse code like message, one repeated chord in a rhythmically irregular sequence. A transmission from an desolate future, interpreted in our time by a composer whose anticipation of impending isolation, or worse, expresses itself through socially oriented songs. Even in an imagined, humanless future, interconnection is the sustenance that binds creatures together.
– Dan Lippel, 2025