Year composed: 2007
Duration: 14′
Instrumentation: piano trio
La ma amarga was commissioned by the Noe Valley Chamber Music Society with assistance from the Carol Franc Buck Foundation. It was written for Graeme Jennings, Leighton Fong, and Christopher Jones, and premiered on April 15, 2007, at the NOe Valley Ministry in San Francisco.
Recorded on la mar amarga album (Albany Records).
Notes:
You may recognize the wonderful opening of Frederico García Lorca’s famous Romance sonámbulo, “Verde que te quiero verde” (“Green I love you green”). The title of my new work for piano trio, “la mar amarga” (the bitter sea) comes from a later section of this poem; I loved the sound of the elided repetition of “(l)a mar” and found in it a strong relationship to the kind of covered repetitions in my own piece.
But you probably don’t know of an oddball work called Sensitive Chaos (published by the Rudolf Steiner Press) by Theodor Schwenk. He wrote this study in the 1960s and subtitled it “The creation of flowing forms in water and air”. His mix of the poetic and the scientific, with chapter headings such as “Archetypal movements of water” and “The formation of vortices” was particularly inspiring as metaphors for my approach to musical shape and direction. Like the gorgeous pictures of water and wind patterns at the end of the book, my music strives to be in a simultaneously fluid yet architecturally static form.
My composition is in three movements, played without pause. The first movement is marked “supple, mysterious, and very fast” and is dominated by the piano. The rhythm is continuous and motoric, almost minimalist in nature, with tiny elongations and diminutions that vary and disrupt the internal repetitions. The second movement features solos by first the violin, and then the cello, and is based on different modes of playing their open strings. The last movement is marked “fierce, wild, but strictly in tempo” and features rhythmic play on a dissonant scale in conjunction with the open strings of the violin and cello.
The piano acts throughout as a kind of giant resonator, with the Sostenuto pedal (the middle pedal on the piano) holding down the bottom octave and allowing those strings to ring freely. My harmony is derived from the physical properties of the overtone series and the construction of each the instruments: the open strings of the violin and cello, and the symmetrical division of the piano into its highest, lowest, and middle registers. La mar amarga was commissioned by Noe Valley Chamber Music with funding from the Carol Franc Buck foundation for Graeme Jennings, Leighton Fong, and Christopher Jones, and is gratefully dedicated to them.