Richard Wernick - Compositional Style

Compositional Style

Wernick has described his style as one that attempts to find common ground with an audience:

My expectation is that I’m not writing down to an audience, but I’m not trying to write above their heads. I’m not writing to an audience which is illiterate and I’m not writing to an audience which is technically educated in music, but I do write for an audience that I assume has experience in listening to music and is willing to at least meet me halfway. So I’ll go halfway to meet them."

As such, critics have sometimes identified his style as more audience-accessible, particularly when compared to more strictly serialist composers of the 20th century. More recently, however, some critics have emphasized the modernist characteristics of his style, calling him a "modernist holdout against prevailing trends toward music that falls easier on the ears."

Harmonic analysis of Wernick's work suggests that his style makes reference to tonal harmony, but is usually based on fixed cells of intervals. He occasionally makes use of twelve-tone sequences and their permutations, but this technique is not necessarily a defining feature of his output. Wernick also makes extensive use of contrapuntal techniques, especially in his string quartets.

In vocal and programmatic works, Wernick's choice of texts often reflect an ideological message. Kaddish Requiem mourns "the victims of Indochina," referring to the contemporaneous Vietnam War as well as to related violence throughout the region. Likewise, the final movement of his Duo for Cello and Piano is a memorial for the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001. Several of his works, most notably Kaddish Requiem and Visions of Terror and Wonder, combine religious texts from multiple traditions.

Performers with whom Wernick has frequently worked include the Juilliard String Quartet, the Emerson String Quartet, David Starobin, Mstislav Rostropovich, Jan de Gaetani, Lambert Orkis, and Gregory Fulkerson.