Some ten or fifteen years ago, a sort of epidemic of short suite or partitalike manuscripts was rampant among the younger composers, and many of these manuscripts reached my music rack. Busy Neoclassical toccata movements alternated with sarabande solemnity; there were cadenzas for both the violin and the piano; and it all ended, more often than not, in a “pure” transcendent apotheosis with the violin mounting higher and higher and fading away. One of the young composers, who was playing and humming his work to me (my pianist and I were reading the score over his shoulder), exclaimed ecstatically when he reached his “transcendent “hymnlike section: “Voilà…le ciel s’ouvre!” My pianist and I looked at each other, and the phrase stuck. “The Heavens opened up” from that day on at certain points in – oh, how many!- Partitas and Sonatinas and Eclogues by different but all equally hopeful and convinced composers. << less