Program Notes
Recognition, for piano and violin with string orchestra (2004/2007), is an arrangement of Piano Quintet, written in memory of my father, who died when I was twelve.
I am that father your boyhood lacked
and suffered pain for lack of. I am he.
—from Book Sixteen: Father and Son, The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald
Recognition is based on musical sketches dating back to 1987. These ideas underwent several transformations—a work for orchestra, a ballet, an act of an opera, and a poem—before I settled on the chamber version inspired by having heard a performance of Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-Flat Major (Op. 44). These images also interweave with musical borrowings from several of my earlier works, including Mestiere, for piano (1979), Trasumanar, for twelve percussionists and piano (1980), Piano Concerto (1983), Recovering, for voice and piano (2000), and In Time’s Unfolding, for piano (2000), all of which in one way or another explore the passage of time, loss, recovery, and transcendence.
To a certain extent I did rely on a rather loose, narrative structure concerning The Odyssey, and, without revealing too much, I can point out—as seen in the subtitle of the work, “for piano and violin, with violin, viola and violoncello”—that the piano may be interpreted as “Odysseus” and the violin as “Telemakhos,” Odysseus’s son. And the opening web-like music suggests the goddess Athena as she pulls Telemakhos out of his daydreams and anger, setting him on a hero’s path of action.
I began Piano Quintet during the summer of 2002 while in residence at Copland House in Cortlandt Manor, New York, as a recipient of the Aaron Copland Award, and completed it during a residency at The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in the fall of 2004. This arrangement for soloists with string orchestra was made in the spring of 2007 in New York City.
