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Orchestra
2022
Cello
Double Bass
Viola
Violin
- Program Notes
- To crave and to have is a 12 minute composition for string orchestra. It was commissioned by the 2022 Next Festival of Emerging artists, and was recorded by the 2022 student fellows, directed by Peter Askim. My compositional process for "To crave and to have" unfolded as a careful study of string articulations and dynamics, observing and plumbing their potential over slowly unfolding harmonic and timbral areas. Listening to the piece after its completion, I was drawn to a passage from Marilynne Robinson's novel "Housekeeping". Robinson writes with urgency and clarity about loneliness and about the gulf between what is and what ought to be. Though I do not consider my work programmatic, something in the parallelism and luminousness of her words resonated in the form and texture of my piece. Robinson writes: "To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do we know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing--the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again." (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1980, pp. 152-3)
- Recording Notes
- Recorded at Reservoir Studios, NYC, June 10 2022.
- Performer Credits
- The Next Festival of Emerging Artists
- Publisher
- OVNDROYT Music