duo or ensemble+ keyboard

This suite was written for my friend, violinist Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Contemporary Music Festival. 

Emanu, trumpet player- Baritone Dilla, a young women- Soprano Milos, a bellhop- Bass-buffo Lasca, a middle-aged woman- Soprane Tiossido, a very young man- Tenor Tope, clarinet player- Tenor Fodere, a mute- Alto Sax

Composer's note: My Piano Trio No.2, “The Blossom”, takes its cue from the image of a flower’s growth. Its three movements chart a course from frozen symmetry to effulgent bloom. On a purely musical level, these metaphors are worked out via an ongoing exploration of aural symmetry.

1. “Frozen”. Here all is symmetry. Symmetries of intervals that generate a ladder of pitches “frozen” in particular registers. Symmetries of time, the music following a strict ternary form, with palindromes abounding. This movement is a “seed”, a template from which more dynamic, propulsive art can emerge.

2. “Thawing”. The music begins to branch out, literally, with long arching lines that become ever more florid and detailed. Its aching, yearning quality suggests a will to grow and transcend constraints. Its symmetries now are more of gesture than structure. The strict abstract constraints of the first movement melt under the merging life force.

3. “In Bloom”. Lines have become free and racing; they create a delicate tangled web. The music rushes like water or wind, but it leaves a trace like sprouting tendrils.

Coloring Sound’s Scent is an etude in harmony (despite its largely contrapuntal texture). I created a series of harmonic “screens” starting on the overtone series of three fundamentals: Ab, C and F. Subsidiary pitch-screens were then built on the third and fifth partials of each of these. The resultant strings of notes, fixed in their registers following their position as partials, were then used as the basis for the creation of melodies and chords. Whenever common tones in a particular register exist between screens (which is often), they became possible pivots for modulations from one string to another.