Found this at the URL http://www.sfcv.org/

Joseph Bloom reviews list member Judith Zaimont's Elegy for String Orchestra:

   Exciting to Heartfelt,
   The Whole Range
   Apr. 3, 1999

   The Women's Philharmonic offered the gamut of rich and rewarding
   selection of works at Herbst Theater Saturday night, from the most
   exciting, The Slough (1998) by Jing Jing Luo, the most dramatic,
   Early American Portrait (1962) by Esther Williamson Ballou, the most
   stylistically mature, Vigil for Cello and Chamber Orchestra (1990)
   by Augusta Read Thomas, to the most heart-felt, Elegy for String
   Orchestra (1998) by Judith Lang Zaimont.

   (stuff deleted)

   Elegy for String Orchestra by Judith Lang Zaimont is a work of
   understated beauty and honest emotion. The work is largely chordal
   but with clear underlying counterpoint. Single notes move in motivic
   fragments, and around them, chords will often settle. From within
   the chords, other notes will arise that become the seeds for other
   melodic impulses. Zaimont moves fluidly between dissonance and
   consonance. Tonal chords do not sound "exceptional" as they would in
   Ives, for instance, nor do they leave lingering key implications.
   They are merely part of an extended harmonic vocabulary that gently
   encloses both consonant and dissonant harmonies.

   At the ends of sections the music settles comfortably onto major
   chords and then move on. It seemed fitting that the work concluded
   on a C Major chord, momentarily unstable in the second inversion,
   but then coming to rest in root position without having passed through
   a dominant chord, obligatory in a conventional cadence.

   The orchestra performed fluently in the Elegy though with a certain
   angularity. A brief double bass solo was beautifully handled by Karen
   Horner. The treatment of the basses in general, independently of the
   cellos, was very effective.

   If I felt any limitation in the work, it was one I sometimes feel
   generally about music composed in our era. With the avant-guarde
   having "been done", and tonal fields long since thoroughly explored
   and exhausted, contemporary composers live in an inherently infertile
   period. New styles, if any, have not yet clearly emerged to provide
   a new orientation for the old cellular units of sounds.

Steve Schwartz