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Duo
2025
Cello
Vibraphone
- Program Notes
- In 2019, composer Kevin Day created a stunningly beautiful & contemplative chamber duet for violin & percussion that was inspired by meditation. The resulting piece, "The Mind is Like Water", uses a wide range of timbres & textures to create unstable currents of energy that eventually arrive to peaceful tranquility. Rediscovering this composition years later, after having undergone my own journey with meditation, began to raise some questions that I hadn't thought of before: What compels someone to seek meditation? What guides them to finding serenity? What personal experiences could someone bring to their meditative journey? How does this change over time? Inspired by and in reaction to Kevin's piece, "The Mind and Spirit Upon Earth" is an exploration of these questions. It focuses in particular on meditation from the perspective of nature - that is, our connection with the earth itself. Like Kevin's piece, this duet is written for a string instrument & percussion which creates turbulent waves of energy that gradually arrives to peaceful tranquility. I thought that the richer, sonorous resonance of the cello, balanced with the warmest sounds of the vibraphone, created an opportunity to evoke ethereal timbres & emotional lyricism against passages influenced by jazz as well as earlier eras of classical music. Thomas Hardy's poem "The Darkling Thrush", which portrays discovering hope against a desolate landscape, also serves as a loose inspiration for this piece. Hardy's strikingly realistic & breathtaking depictions of nature, as well as the speaker's own despair upon witnessing such bleak surroundings as depicted in the poem, guides the search for answers to the questions posed in this piece. Emotional & musical catharsis is therefore earned from two different perspectives: the speaker's musings of unseen hope, and achieving a spiritual level of peaceful tranquility through meditation.
- Performer Credits
- DEMO RECORDING
- Publisher
- M.O.T.I.F.