Couple au lit

Composer's Note:

Couple au lit for violin solo (2021–22) was composed after the painting of the same name by French Impressionist Jean-Louis Forain. It is a surprisingly weird and enigmatic picture, charged with a tension vacillating between tranquility and danger, normality and nightmare. Far from the trivial domestic scene suggested by the title, we see two figures emerging amidst eerily-glowing tones of ecru, one figure as if in troubled sleep and the other inexplicably upright. The music aims to capture the uncanny ambiguity and eldritch atmosphere—to borrow a signature Lovecraftian term—that haunts the painting. Pitch and time intervals are tightly controlled in the meter-less score. Gestures and themes appear and disappear, some reemerge in altered form; the musical procedure is quasi-dialectical. The result is hopefully evocative of the fleetingly meaningful, freely associating ideas and events one experiences in weird dreams and other liminal states.

Violinist Dan Flanagan, dedicatee of the piece and owner of the painting, commissioned the piece and is touring it in concert halls and universities around the U.S., U.K. and Europe beginning October 2022 as part of his solo presentation, "The Bow and the Brush."