What brings us here for flute/alto flute, cello, and piano (2020)
First performance
TBD
TBD
Duration
15 minutes
I. When you look fly (you’re invincible)
II. My heart explodes with love
III. Sweeping up pieces
IV. You can’t go back
15 minutes
I. When you look fly (you’re invincible)
II. My heart explodes with love
III. Sweeping up pieces
IV. You can’t go back
Perusal score (coming soon)
Purchase (coming soon)
Program note
This is my second trio for flute, cello, and piano. I am indebted to Anneke Schaul-Yoder and Derin Öge, my long-time collaborators who premiered my first trio and who were patient teachers about their instruments as we prepared that piece for performance.
Immediately following that premiere, I began sketching the first three movements in the fall and winter of 2019. The first, an ode to the man my father often thought he was—a swagger in his step that said he knew he was, by far, the prettiest man around. And, if there is a sexy flute (and I’m not saying there is!), it’s definitely the alto. The second movements explores and combines two impulses from my first trio--sorrow and playfulness—which, despite their contrasts are often closely united for me in my memories and associations. Title comes from a phrase my mother had written on a birthday present she sent to me in 2011. In the fall of 2019 I gave a lecture for my students at Juilliard about recovery after a setback, telling them of how I had been hit by a car and learned to play flute again. I was unprepared for the traumatic shock of living that experience out loud again in public, and when what is now the opening melody of what is now the third movement came to me I hoped it would offer a kind of reflection and healing, but it took a more virtuosic and frenzied turn, and I enjoy that it allowed me to tap into a kind of energy I would never have sought out otherwise.
These movements together form a kind of deliberate self-reflection, and I chose to honor that process and complete the set in June 2020 (I couldn’t bring myself to create anything during that long spring) with a movement that returns to the alto flute but that is intentionally a stark departure from the rest of the work. When the Covid-19 lockdown hit New York City in the spring of 2020, I knew that, despite all the talk of “when things go back to normal…” that “normal” would never return. There is no going back, only through. In this movement, the right hand of the piano stubbornly insists on a kind of naïve ostinato, and the other parts attempt to take it in new directions. It was a chance for me to play with the tension of conflicting shapes, the possibility of reinterpreting the those piano pitches, the futility of talking to someone who won’t listen, and the moments of beauty that hide the fact that we’re just going in circles.
This is my second trio for flute, cello, and piano. I am indebted to Anneke Schaul-Yoder and Derin Öge, my long-time collaborators who premiered my first trio and who were patient teachers about their instruments as we prepared that piece for performance.
Immediately following that premiere, I began sketching the first three movements in the fall and winter of 2019. The first, an ode to the man my father often thought he was—a swagger in his step that said he knew he was, by far, the prettiest man around. And, if there is a sexy flute (and I’m not saying there is!), it’s definitely the alto. The second movements explores and combines two impulses from my first trio--sorrow and playfulness—which, despite their contrasts are often closely united for me in my memories and associations. Title comes from a phrase my mother had written on a birthday present she sent to me in 2011. In the fall of 2019 I gave a lecture for my students at Juilliard about recovery after a setback, telling them of how I had been hit by a car and learned to play flute again. I was unprepared for the traumatic shock of living that experience out loud again in public, and when what is now the opening melody of what is now the third movement came to me I hoped it would offer a kind of reflection and healing, but it took a more virtuosic and frenzied turn, and I enjoy that it allowed me to tap into a kind of energy I would never have sought out otherwise.
These movements together form a kind of deliberate self-reflection, and I chose to honor that process and complete the set in June 2020 (I couldn’t bring myself to create anything during that long spring) with a movement that returns to the alto flute but that is intentionally a stark departure from the rest of the work. When the Covid-19 lockdown hit New York City in the spring of 2020, I knew that, despite all the talk of “when things go back to normal…” that “normal” would never return. There is no going back, only through. In this movement, the right hand of the piano stubbornly insists on a kind of naïve ostinato, and the other parts attempt to take it in new directions. It was a chance for me to play with the tension of conflicting shapes, the possibility of reinterpreting the those piano pitches, the futility of talking to someone who won’t listen, and the moments of beauty that hide the fact that we’re just going in circles.
