Program Note:   

My seventh piano trio is inspired by mythical dragons. Commissioned by the Wintergreen Festival for premiere there by its dedicatees on 10 July 2019 by Sharan Leventhal, Sarah Kapps, and Peter Marshall, the piece is 19 minutes long, and consists of four movements, with a brief intermezzo between the third and fourth.

The first movement, Earth Dragon, is a fast rondo—a form which alternates two relatively contrasting ideas and often (as in this case) introduces a third somewhere along the line—that begins with a pan-diatonic chorale that serves as an idée fixe throughout the trio as a whole. The first idea is diatonic, and the second idea is chromatic; the chorale serves as the third. Each time material returns it is subjected to new compositional procedures.

The second movement, Water Dragon, consists of a theme and three variations. The tune comes from a tender, A-flat major setting of Emily Dickinson’s poem “Ample Make this Bed” that I made “from 9-10 AM on February 13th, 1989” according to my sketchbook, in a walkup I used to rent on St. Mark’s Place in the Village.

The third movement, Fire Dragon, begins with a restatement of the idée fixe before launching into a second rondo. This one consists of a fistful of musical ideas that are subjected to “cellular” development—that is, they are superimposed, re-contextualized, alternated, and blown apart very quickly and reassembled in new ways before ending, once again, with the chorale.

After a brief return of the Dickinson theme, the finale, Sky Dragon, comprised of three musical ideas—a rhythmic cell, a skein of running sixteenth notes, and an ostinato—continues the quick anagram-like reshuffling ideas begun in the third movement. The form is that of a tightly-constructed “quodlibet,” where all of the themes of the trio are combined in turn.