Year composed: 2001
Duration: 4′
Instrumentation: solo piano
Commissioned by Sarah Cahill, and in memory of Ruth Crawford. Premiered in Merkin Hall, New York City, 2001.
Notes:
In 2001, I returned to studying harmony and resonance with a short work for piano, The blackbird whistling/Or just after. I used the Sostenuto Pedal (the middle pedal on a grand piano) to selectively lift the dampers on the lowest octave and allow those strings to vibrate freely as the piece is performed. This action additionally created sympathetic vibrations when pitches are played elsewhere. I think of this resonance as a kind of afterglow, or aura surrounding the sound, and this effect relates to the meaning of the title; when I told my husband, poet John Campion, what I was doing with resonance, he quoted from Wallace Steven’s Thirteen Way of Looking at a Blackbird:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
This piece was commissioned and premiered by pianist Sarah Cahill, for a concert in Merkin Hall, New York City and dedicated to the memory of composer Ruth Crawford Seeger.