WINTER RINGS
Year of composition: 2017
Instrumentation: violin, piano
Duration: 14′
Commissioned by the 21C Festival and the Royal Conservatory/Koerner Hall
Premiere: Benjamin Bowman, violin and Claudia Chan, piano
Mazzoleni Hall, The Royal Conservatory, Toronto
May 28, 2017
PROGRAMME NOTE
Winter Rings is a meditation on the contrasting forces that animate our experience of the year’s cold months. Specifically the work seeks to evoke our deepened sense of the near vs. the distant, and our amplified perception of interior warmth vs. exterior desolation. Its pitch material is derived from constellations of major and minor thirds in perpetual rotation through harmonic space, which I cast in different time scales and opposing directions to create an almost hypnotic tension between forward energy and stasis. Against the piano’s all-encompassing chromatic universe the violin comes to embody the world of limitations, playing mediator between the effable and the ineffable.