Neal Endicott
Neal endicott's
Commodius Vicus:
Concerto for Tenor Saxophone
Neal Endicott, composer
Commissioned by Saxophonist Andrew Hosler and the Michigan Philharmonic; Nan Washburn, Conductor
Premiered 11/14/25 by Drew Hosler and conductor Nan Washburn with the Michigan Philharmonic on their concert Voices from America at St. Kenneth Church in Plymouth, Michigan
About the Piece:
“riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
So begins James Joyce’s epic — and mostly inscrutable — novel Finnegan’s Wake. After nearly 700 pages of stream of consciousness, allegory, symbolism, passages of foreign, dead, and invented languages, snippets of song, back references, allusion, and contradictions, the novel ends with another “commodius vicus of recirculation,” with the final sentence merging seamlessly back into the first, forming an infinite loop of story.
Seemingly worlds away, a torrent of notes spills from a tenor saxophone as John Coltrane weaves his way through the daunting — yet deceptively simple — harmonies of his signature tune, “Giant Steps.” A series of descending major thirds that perfectly span the octave leave the listener never certain of where in the progression they are: anywhere could be home. Or nowhere. There is no center, no focus, no keystone; yet that very lack of certainty — that ambiguity — gives the piece its cohesion. Around and around spiral those chords, trapped in an unending ouroboros of sound.
Like the Wake, “Giant Steps” could be an endless tale. The jazz master and the enigmatic Irishman brought together in these two parallel expressions of infinity: simplicity and complexity meeting in their purpose.
It is from this connection — seemingly tenuous at first, yet stronger and stronger as it is examined — that “Commodius Vicus” was conceived. In no way intended to be a work on par with either of the masterpieces from which it draws inspiration, the concerto explores the connection of those two works — and others that connect to and splinter away from both — through cyclical structures, streams of consciousness (or sheets of sound, as Coltrane would have it), symmetry and asymmetry, and the juxtaposition of the familiar-as-exotic and the unknown-as-familiar.
The piece begins with a brash and assertive declaration of presence: “Here Comes Everything!” All of the composition’s cards, so to speak, are on the table from the word go. Ideas pour out and reach a cascade of sound that ascends into the ether. From there, in “Spiral Into,” a slow, undulating texture begins to allude to the Giant Steps progression, drawing us into an introspective vastness that roils and churns towards a final virtuosic outpouring from the soloist.The third movement, “A Re-Construction of Nocturnal Life,” begins with a sensual throbbing pulse that rises into a slow, smoky melody. As the saxophone gains intensity and rises back above the orchestra, the harmony solidifies into an ostinato derived from the Giant Steps progression and leads to an improvised cadenza, in which the soloist is urged into expressing the entire extent of their virtuosity and delicate musicality.
In the final movement, “Return,” everything folds back on itself as the piece retreats back through many of the themes of previous movements, ending with a near exact retrograde of the opening bombastic gestures of “Here Comes Everything.”
