FORTUNE is in two parts: "Before" and "After".  The music in "Before" is slow, but gets faster.  The music in "After" gets faster still; but the main tempo is 125 beats per minute.

 One of the ways in which FORTUNE is both Before and After lies in the fact that some of it could have been written before the collapse of tonality, and some of it only after.  But the two strands are not separate, and they co-operate throughout the work. 

FORTUNE celebrates a functional harmony which has room for both old-fashioned and new-fangled pitch-relations. 

FORTUNE celebrates the virtuosity of my friends, the TASHI ensemble, for whom it was composed, and to whom it is dedicated. 

-Charles Wuorinen, 1980