I Sing to Those Within

ensemble clarinet, viola, piano
written spring 2019
duration 8 minutes

premiered May 2 2019, Centre Street Performance Space, Peabody Conservatory by Andrew Im (cl.), Maddi Brightbill (vla.), and Tian Gao (pno.)

I loved cadenzas long before I learned what they were called. There was something electrifying about the precipituous moment the orchestra dropped away, leaving an entire world for a soloist to bear in some Atlantic task of concentration, fortitude, and interpretive power. Oftentimes, the barline, too, would vanish, and time itself would be beholden to the cadenza’s inexorable growth into a gathering storm of explosive virtuosity. These near-improvisatory soliloquies felt like windows into a parallel universe, the lone musician spinning out a complex fantasie of motifs and ideas drawn freely from the orchestra.

I wondered to whom it was that the soloist, eyes closed and almost in a trance, sang. It seemed that the hall’s attendants were irrelevant - they could have been their or not. The soloist could not have been singing for the surrounding musicians, either - they formed a silent arc, a neatly symmetrical visual rhyme to the couplet begun by the audience. The song certainly couldn’t have been for the conductor, stock-still as he was standing, baton pointing soporifically toward the ground. It must have been for those within themselves, I decided.

Though often traversed alone, I Sing to Those Within explores the strange universe of the cadenza through the eyes of a dysfunctional trio of instruments that barely belong together.