Glenn Stallcop

Violin

Composer's Note:

The morning that I received the call from Steven Moeckel in which he asked me to write a piece for unaccompanied violin, I had been reading from a collection of literary prose by Matsuo Basho, the famous Japanese haiku poet. We were in the midst of the long shutdown for the Covid-19 pandemic. Musicians were not working; whole symphony seasons had been cancelled. We discussed the artistic (let alone financial) crisis the situation was creating. He talked of having taken a trip to the Oregon coast and taken long walks through misty forests to facilitate some serious artistic soul searching. He had formulated a plan for an unaccompanied recording and wanted to commission a new work for it.
His talk of hermetic isolation in forests of the Pacific Northwest (where I grew up) seemed to fit into the mood of the material I was reading. I decided start writing with a working title of Mists of the Unreal Dwelling. The "unreal dwelling" was a hut Basho had lived and recuperated in after his famous ten-month journey to Northern Japan in 1690. It was tucked away on a mountain slope behind an oft-neglected shrine overlooking Lake Biwa north of Kyoto. The image seemed to convey both the isolation and reflection which brought the piece into existence.
As I wrote the piece, however, the fog lifted and the work became more extroverted and showy. The "mists" were swept from the title, which became just The Unreal Dwelling. Basho wrote an extended prose poem about the hut and his time there. I was taken with how he wrote with affection of the hut's disrepair and his own battered, road-weary body. His ideals of asceticism. however, were disturbed by his artistic vision and constant restlessness. The music is indeed restless, and displays a fair amount of virtuosity. The work was completed in August of 2020 in Phoenix.