Robert Carl

Double Trio Trio1: Violin, Cello, Piano - Trio 2: Violin (2), Viola, Harp

Composer's Note:

Time/Memory/Shadow is a play of histories---musical history, personal history, the internal history of a work of art which unfolds (yet remains locked) in time. The music was inspired by a curious dream, in which I was watching a film with "conceptual subtitles", i.e. insets which showed instantaneously the results later in the film of various bits of action and dialogue. This gave me the idea for a sextet made up of two trios; the second trio of violin/viola/harp is not the traditional partner which engages its piano trio counterpoint antiphonally and simultaneously, but rather a "ghost" which exists in a different time world, which echoes, prefigures, and comments upon the events as they occur in the first trio. Indeed the piece's compositional process mirrored this concept, as the piano trio was first written as an integral piece, with the second trio then overlaid, like a transparency which gives an initial design a new meaning and level of detailed richness.

One final word. The entire piece is based on a brief march I wrote in college, early in my life as a composer. It is elegiac in tone and completely tonal, and makes a spectral appearance near the end of the piece, as the two trios momentarily coalesce. While I would lie if I denied a certain nostalgia for this tune, I find even grater satisfaction in the way it becomes the object for a very free flow of play that informs the entire piece---a juggling act where diverse, sometimes loopy materials still seem to project connections that only become obvious at the end, when the magician shows his hand and reveals this trick.