Moto Finale

Piano Trio No. 2 was the last piece I fi nished while still living in Miami, before moving to the Asheville area and the mountains of western North Carolina. This score presents bustling, hectic, and chaotic music, perhaps emblematic of a large metropolitan area. The trio opens with fast, heavy, repetitive chordal structures on the piano, and the violin and cello almost immediately introduce a new motif. In quick succession, another motif is introduced by the piano using a syncopated rhythm. All of these motives are heard throughout the work. Again introduced in the piano — in contrasting material — is a triplet sixteenth-note pattern soon picked up also by the violin with an anchoring sustained note in the cello.

— Frederic Glesser

In the Spring of 2018, I spent three months on Cousins Island off the coast of Yarmouth ME as the KISMET Foundation Artist-in-Residence. Yarmouth Time reflects my impressions during this period of being surrounded by intense weather, nature, and beauty.

After an introductory “sunrise,” I capture my experience of two nor’easters with stormy gusts of wind and snow, leaping waves, swaying trees, and shifting gales. As the winds swirl away into calmness, a song arises as a nod to the warm hearts of the people of Yarmouth, echoing their welcoming town motto “Our Latchstring Always Out.” Seabirds, gulls, and ospreys add their own commentary.

Then, I tapped into the feel and enjoyment of walking the local trails, moving through nature, and taking in the scenery, bird calls, fresh air, and vibrant colors. Just before setting off on this walkabout, however, I inserted a sound from the Casco Bay seascape which was new to me — a lobster boat motor.

The work concludes with a sound-portrait of the frequently seen yet ever awe-inspiring pinkhued sunset over the eastern coastline.

— Kim Diehnelt

“Stone Door” is the name of what is now a hiking trail near the Savage Gulf in South Cumberland State Park TN (part of the Appalachian Mountain Chain’s Cumberland Plateau). The “Great Stone Door” is a natural doorway — a ten-foot wide crack in the rim of one of the canyons — used by generations of Cherokee and Chickamauga as a means of passage to the river at the bottom of the gorge. As native peoples were eventually driven from the area, it is believed that passing through Stone Door served as their primary exit — or escape route. This work makes an effort to capture not only my own nostalgia for the place and my feelings of wonder about it, but also the pervasive sense of melancholy stemming from all that has happened there in its long history. To my mind, the idea of one’s moving through Stone Door is both literal and fi gurative, both physical and spiritual.

— Michael Slayton

In February 2005, in the process of recovering from a brief and unhappy romance with a concert pianist, I wrote a short, somber piano work titled Winter in a style of very pure Baroque counterpoint, similar to the J.S. Bach Two-Part Inventions. Then when PARMA announced an opportunity to work with Trio Casals in the Fall of 2020, I couldn’t resist the chance to collaborate again with one of my favorite ensembles, and developed the piece into the present Winter 2005. It begins with the original two-voice piano material broken into three sections, each of which is followed by development for all three instruments, in which the bars of the original melody alternate seamlessly with new phrases; this is followed by a new fugal section, a little more polyphonic development of the original material, and finally a tutti restatement with the strings carrying the two melodic lines.

Early music counterpoint is my first love in composition; the challenge I always face in deploying it is creating something that the modern listener — more accustomed to harmony based “classical” music — will find enjoyable and not too formal or artificial. In Winter 2005, I like to think that the lyricism of the violin lines helps bridge those idioms.

— L Peter Deutsch

A Slavic ballad genre typified by marked contrasts of slower and faster passages, the dumka (“thought” or “memory”) inspired works by Borodin, Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 4. Exemplifying the Romantic era’s “progressive tonality,” Dvořák’s six Dumky are each in a different key: E minor, C# minor, A major, D minor, Eb major, and C minor.

Approximately one third the duration of Dvořák’s trio, Dumkyana is a single movement comprising 3 solos, 3 duos, 3 trios, and a coda. In the order they are heard, the duo and trio sections variously quote, rearrange, or otherwise transform portions of Dvořák’s six corresponding Dumky in their original keys. Lacking such direct Dumky references, the solo passages derive from Dvořák’s unusual tonal scheme: his six keys generated new harmonic progressions and furnished the hexachordal basis of a unifying 12-tone row first heard in the opening cello solo. During the latter half, brief references to works by Beethoven, Berg, Debussy, and Rimsky-Korsakov can also be heard.

Dumkyana (originally Variations and Soliloquies) was composed for the Amicizia Trio (Johanna Kosak, Song-A Cho, Stephanie Iovine), who premiered it in 2014 at Columbia College Chicago, Northern Illinois University, and the University of Illinois in a program also featuring works by Zack Browning, Durwynne Hsieh, Tim Schirmer, and Daniel Temkin.

— Robert Fleisher

Water in Motion was inspired by the Cache la Poudre River in Colorado. It is an imagining of the sounds of the canyon just outside the town of Fort Collins, over the course of a 24 hour period. The beginning of the piece is set in the middle of the night, when the canyon is quiet and nearly still. Initially, the piano and cello combine to give a sense of a dark, clear sky, cool air, and calm water. As morning breaks, and the sounds of jumping fish and insects can be heard, the music
reflects those changes; the violin in particular can be heard imitating buzzing insects. As the day progresses and becomes more active, the music swells and grows, conjuring images of rushing rapids, bird calls, and deeper waters. As those sounds diminish and the landscape returns to calm during the evening, the original musical ideas return in a new form. This is designed to leave the listener with a sense of tranquility, the same type of contented feeling one
gets after a day spent in water and sun.

Musically, the main theme — a descending series of parallel thirds that mimics falling water — can first be heard at 0:37 in the piano, though it is difficult to hear its continuity until 0:58. This theme returns in a variety of forms throughout the piece, but can be heard most clearly in all three voices at 2:15. The secondary theme, played by the piano and cello, opens the piece and closes the piece. At its closing, however, the piano is left unresolved on the dominant chord of
this theme, hinting at the cyclical nature of both the music and the water it represents.

Historically, the Cache la Poudre River has been home to Arapaho peoples, fur trappers, farmers, ranchers, university students, and a vast diversity of residents. Today, it provides irrigation, drinking water, and recreation for residents and visitors alike along Colorado’s Front Range mountains. It feeds farms and ranches that grow food for the entire nation in an environment where water is scarce. Its source is primarily snowfall, and its fragility is on full display during summers that follow particularly dry winters. The resulting fires and floods of the recent past have left an indelible mark on this part of the country. Fortunately, there are organizations working tirelessly for water conservation and climate justice throughout Colorado, which have ripple effects throughout the United States.

— David Klock

In 1937, my mother’s nine year old brother Jaroslav — known as “Bobby” — was abducted and brutally murdered. Bobby was a sweet, happy boy who was always singing. He was my mother’s best friend and she never recovered from this traumatic loss at the age of 11. “Bobby’s Song” is what I imagine he might have sung with his grieving sister from beyond the grave to comfort her and remind her of happier, more innocent times. The opening piano measures and first iteration of the poignant main theme by the violin invoke my young mother’s tears falling and the sadness in her heart as she visited the site of his murder daily for many months to grieve in private. Hearing her crying from beyond the veil, Bobby responds in kind, echoing the theme through the voice of the cello. The mood then shifts while they both recall the fun that they had playing together until their joy was shattered by an unspeakable planned crime, expressed by an extended fermata. The beginning of the third iteration of the main theme is unaccompanied by piano to reflect the stark reality that both of their lives had been changed forever. However, the re-entry of the piano and introduction of an element of hope in the closing measures mirrors the expectation that my mother always had of being reunited with Bobby when she passed away in 2017. It is comforting to know that the two siblings are now together again in spirit after 80 years of separation.

— Joanna Estelle