A Line for a Walk (2019)
14 minutes
violin and piano
Premiere: October 2021 - Ear Taxi Festival, Epiphany Center for the Arts, Chicago, IL
Commissioned by Hanna Hurwitz
PROGRAM NOTE
A Line for a Walk is a sonata for violin and piano written for and dedicated to my longtime friend and collaborator Hanna Hurwitz. Named after Paul Klee’s adage about drawing, the piece follows a little melodic line — heard immediately at the beginning — as it moves through different environments: dreamy, playful, violent, lyrical. This journey is divided into eight parts that flow together without break: four longer parts, three little “trampoline” interludes and a final short coda. Each of the short parts either recalls or foreshadows one of the non-adjacent longer parts. Even the longer parts are fairly short, lending the flow of the piece a gnomic character, reminiscent of the constrained canvas size Klee favored.
The first three larger parts are:
an opening “declaration,” which introduces the main ideas of the sonata in a freely rhetorical manner;
“in the mists,” in which plaintive violin melodies wander amid a drifting linear atmosphere in the piano;
“scherzo,” a nervous, ephemeral dance between the two instruments, always on the verge of falling apart.
From this point on, the unfolding of the piece is more liquid and continuous, leading to an unexpected epilogue.
Written in December 2019, the piece was written just before the pandemic year, with all its disquiet and anxiety. The way the piece moves from a confident, forthright beginning to an unstable ending now seems somewhat prescient.