Red
ensemble piano trio
written spring-winter 2020
duration 20 minutes
Written for Yihan Sun
Chamber music has never come naturally to me. My childhood was spent listening to the overblown Hollywood sound of exaggerated orchestral film scores, and it took years for me to slowly transition from those massive, beefed up ensembles to regular orchestras to large chamber groups to quartets.
So, when my classmate and friend, pianist Yihan Sun, asked me to write a series of piano pieces for her, I was initially hesitant. I had not written any substantial works for piano until then, and I was not confident that I could imagine placing my typical ideas into such an intimate setting. Her suggestion, however, was a bit more involved than just writing piano pieces - they would be based on her own work as a visual artist. Red, a series of her pieces, was mesmerizingly minimalistic yet capricious and drew me in immediately with its whimsy and unique language. With a bit of negotiating, we settled on a three-movement piano trio.
The first piece of hers portrays a highly abstracted dance, with wispy strands blooming downward into a luscious red dress. To capture the thin yet energetic motion of the visuals, the movement, Dance, is filled with rapidly shifting mixed meters and a constant ebb and flow of high, thread-bare harmonics contrasting with full, darkened bass tones.
Yihan’s second piece features two structures of dark, malevolent spots interweaved with the grayed outline of a flower. In response, the second movement, Malignant Flowers, is composed primarily of two downward sequences of triads in the piano representing the piece’s febrile splotches.
The final piece depicts a wild swirl of black, inklike jets surrounding a melting, sunset-like red circle. I saw in the visuals a mercurial motion, and wrote the third movement, Jeremy Bearimy, as a large scale sequence of rising seconds. The piece builds from plodding, vast arpeggios to a furious climax, drops down for a gentle reprieve, and gradually whirls back to life via a series of increasingly frenetic modulations. Finally, the music fades away back into thin, wispy strands.
Collaborating with artists of varied media remains one of my favorite and most enduringly rewarding creative acts, and I am grateful to Yihan for her patience and dedication in seeing this project through - especially during such a challenging year.