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Duo
2025
Cello
Piano
- Program Notes
- I've lived nearly my whole life having to deal with severe mental health issues including suicidal ideation. Additionally, two of my closest friends took their own lives - one, Collin Hamshar, when I was 14 and the other, James Marshall, just a year ago. Suicide has been this strange specter present throughout my whole life, and recently I've been reading and speaking to professionals about my own struggles and how to better discuss suicide with those around me in the most healthy manner. This work is the result of this. The opening piano line represents a sort of centering meditative state. This state is slowly transformed by the introduction of the repeated falling figure, a sort of intrusive thought, which snowballs and transforms. At first it seems somewhat seductive and romantic, evolving then into something darker, then going off the rails in a sort of delirium before coalescing into an almost euphoric plateau before the piece "regains focus" and returns to the opening material before a short peaceful coda, having resolved the intrusive thoughts and somehow finding stable footing again. "Letting yourself have the thoughts and the words can be precisely what relieves you of the need for the action... After all, you can always kill yourself tomorrow." - From How Not to Kill Yourself by Clancy Martin
- Recording Notes
Performers have chosen to remain anonymous. There is a score follower video attached in the external link for this submission.
- Publisher
- Oliver Dubon Editions
- External Links