Duration: ca. 27 min.
pno, toy pno, cel, fl, ob, cl, bsn, hn, 2 vln, vla, vcl, db, 2 perc
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Program Notes:
A concerto for piano, toy piano, and celesta, this piece explores my interpretation of five pieces of artwork by artist Zoe Avery Nelson. Their artwork typically employs the use of negative space as well as drastic color changes and ripping of canvas. These patterns give off a sense of destruction and struggle within her works, something that I often like to portray as well. Silence and resonance become increasingly important, and moments of rest in the piece portray that negative space that is seen in the paintings. Along with these jagged edges, there are also moments of almost childish bliss. Often a mixture of light and ambient colors will be juxtaposed with these intense pallets, adding a quality of peace amidst chaos. The toy piano accentuates this nostalgic character and a longing for control.
The first movement is based on the painting Eleven Beach Spiders and is biting right from the get go. The toy piano begins with a sharp-sounding mordent, which is an ornament indicating that the note is to be played with a single rapid alternation with the note above or below. The strings eventually come into the texture, calm and static in their rhythmic motion, acting as an atmospheric accompaniment. The interactions with the keyboard and strings continue to intensify until a scalar build up occurs, leading to a brutal moment of noise and alignment with the two entities. The piece then breaks apart once again and the toy piano takes a small solo amidst the strings to finish. The second movement takes influence from The Holes in Memory Create the Colors in my Mind which portrays a dark grey-ish space. Within this landscape, colors begin to emerge from the higher register of the instruments. The piano makes a constant rise from the low register to the high, and after a moment of intense tension reaches a plateau that relaxes for a short period of time before fading off into nothingness. The third movement is the B-side of The Mosquito Girls. Minimal in its content it is a soft collage of light colors. The music focuses heavily on stacked perfect fifth intervals with the celesta accentuating this placid atmosphere. The fourth movement is the most aggressive of the set taking a rising scalar pattern that is juxtaposed canonically across the whole ensemble. This symbolizes the jagged edges and quickly changing lines of the painting The Mosquito Girls: A side. The final movement, It all breaks down (in several parts), works to deconstruct and become lost within itself. The painting it is inspired by is the darkest in its series, and much of the timbres explored tend toward the grey scale. White noise and light sounds float around, and eventually a lontano is reached, allowing the music to live within a dark and endless abyss.
All these paintings can be viewed at Avery Zoe Nelson’s website in the 2013/2012 collection: