There is a fragment from Steven Stucky’s piece The Stars and the Roses (2013) embedded in And the River, a kernel of musical DNA forming the basis for the entire work. The music of And the River is this metaphorical river and the things being carried on it – different kinds of music that may suggest different eras, a reflection on the inevitable passage of time and passage of a life. ‘The river’ is, of course, a common but important metaphor for the passage of time. “At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being.It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, the congruence of blazing and enchanted images, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed.”
The title comes from Thomas Wolfe’s book, Of Time and the River, with this epigraph in the score: with a compact chamber orchestra of woodwinds, brass and strings (double string quartet and bass). And the River is significantly about color: in addition to the soloists there are a pair of percussionists playing flower pots, cymbals, tuned cowbells, log drum, etc. There is a progression of stage movement built into the piece: both Sarah and Thomas start at the piano keyboard, then Thomas moves to play inside the piano while Sarah is still at the keyboard Thomas returns to the keyboard, then goes to the toy piano, then Sarah joins at the other toy grand, and so on. During the course of about twenty minutes, the soloists play at the keyboard (piano 4-hands), inside the piano (plucking and harmonics), and on two toy grand pianos. In the order presented here or, selections in any order can be chosen to fit the needsĪnd the River Concerto for Duo-Pianists and Chamber Orchestra (2018)Ĭo-commissioned by Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival and Oberlin SinfoniettaĪnd the River, a concerto for duo-pianists and chamber orchestra, is at its core both a celebration of HOCKET (Sarah Gibson and Thomas Kotcheff) and their unique performance voice as well as a piece in memoriam Steven Stucky, the wonderful composer and close personal friend we lost in February 2016.
The 'title song,' for example, comes from Michael Ondaatje'sĬarving an Alphabet was commissioned for SAKURA by New Music USA for premiere at the 2020 Piatigorsky InternationalĬello Festival and was completed in summer 2019.Ĭarving an Alphabet is designed to be performed as a complete book of madrigals I adapted fragments of poetry from two of my own favorite poets, Michael Ondaatje and Czeslaw Milosz, which I use as titlesĪnd scenarios for this collection of madrigals-without-voices. To help me inhabit the appropriate creative space The emotional landscape (lovelorn, passionate, miserable, nature-loving, awestruck, etc.) of the late-16th /early-17thĬentury madrigal composers and their favorite poets is also reflected here. Madrigals, Carving an Alphabet, composed with the expressivity, virtuosity and hyper-extended range of SAKURA always My response to these cello-playing madrigalists is a new book of SAKURA cello quintet's core repertoire has included direct transcriptions of Renaissance madrigals in four and five voicesĮver since they created the ensemble several years ago.