Instrumentation: Flute
Duration: 5:25
Premiere: 3/7/2005
Laurel Ann Maurer
Salt Lake City Library
Salt Lake City, Utah
Purchase Solo | Purchase The American Flute Collection
Program Note:
Coursing Through the Still Green is for solo flute, duration 3 minutes, in the collection The American Flute, published by Subito Music. Inspired by a poem by Wang Wei, the eighth-century Chinese poet and painter, the poem tells of a blue stream as it runs down the mountain, “Coursing throught the still green / Deep inside the pine forest,” while the poet feels the fullness of the moment, I have tried to capture the sense of stillness with bursts of motion that joyfully spring out. The poem can be found in the book Walking to Where the River Ends by Wang Fang yu, Suzanne Graham Storer, and Mary de G. White, published in 1980 as an Archon Book of the Shoestring Press. This is part of a volume called The American Flute that composer Timothy Vincent Clark and I created after flutists at a National Flute Convention in Kansas City told us how much they needed flute music to introduce high school and college students to contemporary flute repertoire. In addition to our music, there are excellent pieces by Ann Callaway, Joseph Koykkar, David McBride and Mark Winges. You can find the entire volume here. And you can hear Laurel Zucker’s beautiful recording of Coursing through the Still Green on her Inflorescence V-Music for Solo Flute on Spotify.
Press:
“…Maurer captured the seamless lyricism of Shatin’s piece…” –Deseret Morning News