Auburn Shade

Written in 2020 for flute, viola, and harp (8 minutes)

What do you call this ensemble? A Debussy trio? Or just a trio for flute, viola, and harp? Either way it's an instrumentation that I really like but, honestly, I've heard only a handful of pieces that I really love for this instrumentation. There's so much potential for warmth and color, but I think a big reason why I haven't heard a lot of pieces with this instrumentation is because – at least in my experience – it’s not the easiest instrumentation to actually make a piece with.

Maybe the challenge has something to do with my aesthetic, or the way that I write, or what my music sounds like, but I had an extremely difficult time actually getting this piece off the ground, and it ended up much shorter than I originally intended after going through at least three different iterations.

 I think there’s a lot I left unsaid with this one – it almost seems like a sketch of something I would have liked to have stretched my legs on into a 25-30 minute piece or collection of pieces. For now, this little bite-sized piece will suffice.

 I’m not sure what else to say for this one… I wrote it for my friends. Kaitlin, Alaina, and Kathy are some of my most trusted musical comrades from UNT, and three folks that put up with a lot of my bull shit and crazy ideas (including going along with me on my 9-hour piece A Timeshare). I’m glad we could get together for this.

 I’ve never once written a harp glissando…

 A small anecdote: this piece was premiered during the first stages of returning to concerts from COVID lockdowns. Because this piece was flute – a wind instrument – we were required to have the players at least 15 feet apart, and there couldn’t be an audience. If you know anything about my music at this point, you can probably guess that these three could barely hear each other, but the decca tree recording the thing and putting out the livestream couldn’t pick it up either. Imagine 3 people, spread way across a huge stage, playing an extremely intimate and quite piece, but not being able to hear each other while I’m getting texts during the concert asking if the audio for the live stream had broken because nobody at home could hear it either. Good thing I had the foresight to close-mic everyone and record it myself on the fly…