John D. McDonald

Piano Trio Violin, Cello, and Piano

Composer's Note:

When we feel frail or nervous, can we still do things with a certain conviction?

Cobbled together over a period of many years during which the nature of the project for which this music was intended kept changing (and a pandemic intervened), Frail, Faint; Nerves Bad was begun in 2015 as a trio meant to accompany Gunther Schuller’s Piano Trio No. 3 (2013) on a proposed concert program by the formidable Gramercy Trio that would have included painted and/or sculpted responses to the music in an interactive, inter-arts presentation. This collaborative project unfortunately has not come to pass, but the first movement (completed for Gramercy in August 2017) sat restlessly in an envelope for some time. In 2023, with the knowledge that the Fidelio Trio—great and steadfastly virtuosic musical friends—wished to return to Tufts and the New England area as part of a US tour, I returned to this music and added a second movement (derived from a saxophone solo Simple Gunther Elegy that I wrote for Ken Radnofsky in 2015).

In its slightness, this trio seeks a certain profundity, pulling together memories of having studied valuably with Gunther at Tanglewood during a formative time for me, and having performed a good number of his pieces in subsequent years. As a small memento of Gunther and his myriad contributions to the field of music (far too many to detail here), the piece alludes to my encounters with him during his late eighties, when the vulnerabilities of age showed their signs but didn’t slow his creativity even a little. I’m also thinking here of the human frailty we all share, especially now—brought to light particularly in the last five years and perhaps reducible to our collective inability to sit, becalmed.

To the Gramercy and Fidelio Trios, In Memory of Gunther Schuller (1925-2015).