Encore/Eulogy

Written in 2021 for solo viola (10 minutes)

Encore/Eulogy has two main sources. The first is an appropriation of the original version of my viola solo Black and Grey – the original piece, written in 2016/2017 was about the same length but much more note-heavy, with a large number of gestures and microtones, huge leaps, and some unprepared and immature uses extended techniques. In short: it was a sloppy mess with a lot of things that I thought I “should” include in the piece. The original composition was never performed but workshopped with the person whom I wrote it for and after working on the revisions of Black and Grey that are found on this site, I kept the material for the original version just in case an opportunity to use that material came about. Eventually it would with the 2020/2021 Composers Conference.

The 2020 Composers Conference was canceled due to COVID, but they instead asked us to compose solos for the performers of the Contemporary Performance Institute (the performance wing of the conference). In the first year, I wrote Poetics as Practice for my friend Jack Yarbrough, and with the success of these solo concerts, when the 2021 Composers Conference was back on, we were paired again with players from the CPI program. This time, I was paired with violist Sebastian Stefanović who requested something that might be suitable for an encore.

I don’t entirely think I succeeded in Sebastian’s request, but I think I did that thing within the context that my aesthetic interests might take me. At the same time, I was working on a deeply personal piece, All Things Seem Mention of Themselves, and I think there is a lot of residual subject matter that worked its way into Encore/Eulogy. This is partially evidenced in the title, but also in the energetic and clear development that happens throughout this piece. It’s much less abstract than a lot of my other work. Working on a few really emotional and heavy pieces, I felt that it was time to write a celebration of life.  

This piece is also a sibling-piece to this is a day that yawns like a caesura. The material relationships, I think, are rather obvious.