Instrumentation
violin and piano
Duration
9 minutes
Program Note
Much of the collected repertoire for violin and piano operates under a central tenet: the violin presents thematic material, and the piano accompanies and elaborates. In anti-ombré, I challenged myself to avoid this kind of writing as much as possible. The violin thus spends much of the work in an accompanimental role, while the piano offers the bulk of the melodic material. In keeping with the piece’s title, the musics presented by the two instruments are also often extremely differentiated, in a kind of “isolated togetherness.”
Simultaneously, this is a piece about fixation. When accompanying, the violin’s incessant repeated note suggests the sound of rain falling, calling to my mind a line from the poem “Three Crows,” by Jane Kenyon: “Spring rain, relentless as obsession…” The piano, for its part, nearly always plays chords drawn from a progression heard at the beginning of the piece. Even when this mold is broken out of, as it is in occasional extended, cadenza-like solo passages for each instrument, the music is eventually dragged back to its origins—appearing to us in a different light, perhaps, but materially unchanged.
anti-ombré lasts approximately nine minutes in performance.
Selected Performances
Avery Scott, violin; Jennie Bai, piano
October 8, 2025 (World Premiere)
The New School – Mannes School of Music (New York, NY)
Tristan Wilson 