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Four Scenes
2016

violin
cello

duration 13'

first performance: Boston Conservatory at Berklee / Katie Landsdale and Andrew Mark /
March 1, 2017


SCORE  
Bees Meet
A Good Sandwich
Il Commendatore
Nashville Serenade


PROGRAM NOTE
Four Scenes is exactly what you'd expect from its title: a suite of four pieces each illustrating different scenes, in this case scenes I encountered or thoughts that occurred while out walking around town in July of 2016. The first scene is Bees Meet, after noticing two bees who circled casually on their own paths and then seemed almost to fly into each other. They then flew together as a pair until once again veering off on their own. A Good Sandwich came from a rather unconvincing advertising slogan: "a good sandwich is like an old friend" . . this movement simply 'sandwiches' one set of sounds within another – although there's also a hint of musical 'mayonnaise' in there too. The third scene, Il Commendatore, because I was walking past statues, had been listening recently to Don Giovanni, and was thinking about the violin and cello duelling with each other; and the fourth scene, Nashville Serenade, after a trip to the Country Music Hall of Fame reminded me how fantastically varied a musical genre can be even when one of its basic components – its repertoire of typical chord changes, for example – can often remain essentially identical over thousands of songs. Keeping this movement simple was the challenge.