Triptych: Dark Waters; Parting; Approaching Home

Performing Notes

While composing Triptych my family was in the process of relocating from the Bay Area back to the East Coast (Washington D.C.). Travel-related thoughts and emotions – leavings and arrivals, partings and introductions – were much on my mind. At the same time I had been listening to Chris Costanza’s fantastic recording of the Bach Cello Suites while beginning Triptych. Not surprisingly my work reflects these elements: a suite of three movements (fast-slow-fast) that is programmatically loosely based on the idea of a “travelogue.”

Dark Waters is the Prelude, a “hat tip” in the direction of the legato arpeggiations of the opening Prelude movement of Bach’s Suite No. 1, but here cast as turbulent flowing water. It is a quiet, yet uneasy perpetual motion movement that sinuously moves through the cello’s registers, much of it bowed in larger groupings of notes that require real control from the player. The movement is built from arpeggios and a small cell made of variants of the intervals of a 2^nd plus a 3^rd (e.g. G-F#-E).

Parting is reminiscent of the Sarabande movements in the Suites. Slow and expressive, it features double-stopped contrapuntal legato lines that must sing while making the player shift fingers as they sustain an additional note above or below. The movement also explores the same melodic intervals of a 2^nd and a 3^rd. The short arpeggiated figure, introduced here and there as an aside, hints at the main material of the piece’s finale. It moves attacca into…

Approaching Home is of a completely different and new world. Expressing the excitement and optimism of the upcoming new chapter in our lives, it is light, based on fast ricocheted arpeggios of simple diatonic harmonies. It is more harmonic and rhythmic than melodic, for the most part, and is virtuosic in a very understated way. It is not easy for the cellist to be an harmonic “rhythm machine.” There are subtle melodic-rhythmic shifts in the bounced arpeggios as the patterns shift between groupings of 6’s and 8’s per beat. A descending melodic 3^rd (D-C#-B) is featured in a refrain-like passage heard throughout, subtly recapitulating the same genetic material of the whole piece. Towards the end of the movement there is a brief “Bachian” dramatic stop and cadenza-like passage which hearkens back to the work’s opening arpeggiated material. The optimism of the ricocheted harmonies soon return as the music quietly ascends to the upper register of the cello and ends on a high held single note that fades without resolution.

I’d like to especially thank the exceedingly gracious cellists Christopher Costanza and Peter Gelfand for their invaluable assistance.

Triptych was commissioned by the Irving M. Klein International String Competition and was premiered during the semifinalist round of the 2013 Klein Competition on June 8, 2013 in San Francisco, CA.