Café Suite

Café Suite is a five-movement work for flute choir. Each movement is named after a different drink and reflects the “character” of it in the music.

The opening movement, raspberry latte, is marked “bright and fruity”, and has a light swing feel, mimicking the jazz often played in coffee shops.

The second movement, london fog, is marked “mysterious, hazy” – I used this movement to pull as many “wispy” sounds out of the ensemble with extended techniques such as air sounds, whistle tones, and timbral trills, as well as using the low register of the piccolos and the high register of the bass flutes. The third movement, matcha latte, is built (almost) entirely on a pentatonic scale and utilizes a heterophonic texture in the piccolos, referencing the drink’s Chinese and Japanese origins. Tongue pizzicato in the low flutes and sixteenth note flourishes are used to achieve the “light but earthy” feel.

Movement four, masala chai, is marked “warm, rich, comforting,” and opens with a drone in the low flutes, mimicking a tambura or shruti box, and a cadenza in flute 1 that introduces one of two major themes in this movement - the Vande Mataram, a Bengali poem that translates to “I praise you motherland.” The poem was adopted as a national song of India, honored equally with the national anthem, and played a vital role in the Indian independence movement. Flute 2 introduces the secondary theme, Lag Jaa Gale, which translates to “Embrace me”, a Hindi song by Madan Mohan Kohli and Raja Mehdi Ali Khan written in 1964. These themes are used in two chorales – one in the alto and bass flutes, and one in the C flutes.

The final movement, shaken espresso, is fast and frantic, marked “jittery, excited”. Trills and overblown tremolos represent the “shaking” and the foamy texture it creates on the drink, and fugue-like sections, percussive extended techniques, and demanding technical passages create an exciting, flashy closer.