Click here to listen to the complete series

A trilogy of songs (Opening, Autumn, Closing) composed by Jim Aitchison and dedicated to Mark Rothko.  The songs have an Avant Garde edge and felt very unsettling to me.  Both harsh and triumphant, the sustained notes made by the string section would have worked well in a thriller/horror film.  Of the three, I consider Opening the best.  However, as I listened to the three songs on the website, I noticed that Closing sounded the same as Opening.  If the Tate website made a mistake and uploaded one song in two different links, or the composer intended this to happen, I don’t know.  Despite the confusion, I loved Opening’s horn, for its comforting sound contrasted well against the string section’s harsh harmonies.  I could imagine it as Aitchison’s interpretation of a sun’s rays gliding over a cityscape.

While I found the compositions interesting, I did have one complaint.  I did not care much for the singer and the people who whispered (I think that’s what I heard) over the music.  I found them superfluous and did not work well with the instrumental section.

In The Guardian, Jonathan Jones analyzed the Seagram series’ dark nature.