Adjacent Spaces

Written in 2020 for piano trio (6 minutes)

Original program note:

With a trio, I think we are starting to really explore cooperation, a real occupation of space, and a development of narrative unity. There are no longer "two" as separate, but "three" as together. Eva-Maria Houben describes this interestingly: “the trio is a vulnerable body. Collisions, frictions, but also compensation and protection against danger become important in the trio.” With this piece, I’m more interested in creating a space, or a place for three to be together rather than providing a strict hierarchical relationship. As I’ve said about a lot of my work, I always attempt to give a general direction to this space. “It’s over there.” The piece can be generalized as very quiet with long notes, some short notes, many pauses, and a specific harmonic framework but this is only the vaguest idea: the details are left for you.

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 This was the last piece I finished before the pandemic (or, at least one of the last pieces - it's hard to say exactly which one was the last one). There was a weird “pre-production” period of this piece where the university composition Division paired off with the Division of Chamber Music Studies and I was selected to write for this specific trio. It was abundantly clear that the institution was not entirely organized with how this process was supposed to happen: we weren't given clear details or clear deadlines or anything like that and nothing was made clear to the performers of how this was going to work. However, the folks in this ensemble were extremely friendly, extremely kind and gracious with their time, and extremely enthusiastic about doing a piece by me; I think we found some solidarity in the loose nature of the institutionalized collaboration.

 From my understanding, I was going to have a long time to write this piece, but I woke up one day with an e-mail saying that I had a week to turn in the final parts. I quickly turned this piece around, writing essentially intuitively off how I knew I wanted the piece to start and finish – and a few (very short) moments in the middle. Still, I made the deadline.

 After reaching out to the ensemble and sending them the parts and the score, we set a time to meet and talk about it and it was at this meeting where we all learned that nobody had any idea what was going on and we decided to just do this on our own, with them agreeing to play the piece a number of times and we would work on a number of things together.

 Those rehearsals were extremely fun, and it was really a pleasure getting to know these folks. However none of these plans came to life when COVID shut down everything. Now, I might be getting some of these details wrong, but the story I heard was that one of the members was going to quickly bail and get back to their home country before absolutely everything shut down. Having rehearsed so much music together and having become friends, the trio decided that it would be valuable and important to them to record all of their repertoire and all the music they had planned to perform that season. I'm incredibly fortunate, lucky, and thankful that they recorded my piece in this scrappy last minute and chaotic moment for all of our lives. I'm not sure exactly when they recorded this, and they asked me not to tell exactly how they did it, but it was a glimmer of light and a rather dark time at the beginning of the Pandemic to know that these folks cared so much about their work – and valued my work as well – to get the band together one more time before going their separate ways.