Program Note:   

Late one evening at Yaddo during summer 1983, the copy of Romaine Rolland's Jean Christophe that I was reading about to fall from my hands as I nodded off at the foot of the broad staircase that flows downwards from an enormous Tiffany window depicting the woman who, along with her husband, founded the estate, in a pretty blue dress bound tenderly at the waist by a ribbon, I intuited — in the same way that a driver "sees" a child streaking out of a suburban front yard into the street to capture a ball — a woman descending that very staircase dressed in the same flowing white dress. Her right hand was slightly raised, as though holding a candle, a telegram, a poem, or a letter. I believe that I saw the spirit of Katrina Trask.

Accordingly, when asked to compose a work honoring the spirit of Yaddo on the one hundredth anniversary of the Corporation's founding, my thoughts turned to that evening in 1983. The first movement, Wings, is marked "in puffs, like wind under wings." It is comprised mainly of rolling canons — imitative strands of musical pitches that, when spaced out properly, are the aural equivalent of waves of air or water. The second movement, Minute Scherzo, is a sixty-second long palindrome based on a synthetic scale with two augmented seconds in it. The final movement, Couples, is a quick rondo in which every instrument has a musical doppelgänger that shadows it either rhythmically or melodically. I composed it at Yaddo in the Stone Tower.

Commissioned by the Corporation of Yaddo and composed in celebration of Yaddo's Centennial Celebration, Angels was first performed by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra on May 7th, 2000 at the Ethical Culture Society of New York.