Blue Color Field Tryptic

Written in 2016/2017 for Violin, Cello, and Piano

This piece feels like the first “mature” piece I wrote – whatever that means – even though there is a lot of immaturity and anxiety in the music, in the program note below, and in the context of writing and realizing this piece. It’s really quite raw now that I’m listening to it several years later. Trump was just inaugurated, I thought I would have to do the second year of my Master’s (I seriously considered dropping out of grad school because of this but ended up getting the funding I needed), I was feeling a relationship start to break down... So many things leading to that quarter-life crisis I mentioned in the note below.  

On the other hand, this piece feels extremely important to me professionally. This was the first piece to get any amount of play beyond the academic hall; the first piece of mine Apartment House played; the first piece on the BBC; the first piece someone really mentioned “hearing the plains” in my work… so many little signifiers that say a lot about where my work was going and where I was personally.

For a long time the piano trio was my favorite genre, but now I feel a little more inclined to a piano quartet – a viola makes everything better…

Original Note:

Blue Color Field Tryptic was inspired, in terms of structure, by the works of Andy Warhol. Although I can say honestly that I have never been the biggest fan of his work, I found his use of negative space, and how he alters it drastically, to be quite compelling. Investigating this formal property, I wrote the piece in sections where the ‘negative space’ is reversed in the first two, and what I feel to be exposed or evaporated in the end- something like 2 parts in 3. Keeping with Warhol’s work, the piece is proportional in each section allowing structural relationships to accurately align throughout each section.

Although the piece was initially created through an intellectual exercise, the piece began to take shape into an expressive statement for me. In the final days before the premiere performance, I made drastic rewrites; asking my good friends to follow me and my pen scribbled notes while I played the piano. This hectic experience was triggered by a massive spike in my anxiety and a bout of self-doubt deep in the bowels my quarter-life crisis.

 The end result of this became a desperate attempt, a plea for tranquility. I have always taken an interest in music that could generally be called ‘quiet, and slow,’ but to me, I feel the desperation, and the need for peace in this piece. In its own way, the piece was become a sort of “abstract expressionist” call. Although there is no programmatic element in this piece, I feel the emotional weight with this piece, and it has come to represent something much greater and personal to me. I find the yearn for tranquility, the call to meditation, and the exercise of breathing within the slow dialogue between the strings and piano. The end becoming a slow collation of thoughts and the first steps to ease.