Instrumentation: Piano Quartet
Duration: 8:25
Commission: Currents Ensemble
Premiere: 2/1/03
Currents Ensemble
Ruggero Allifranchini, violin; Carla-Maria Rodrigues, viola
Wilhelmina Smith, cello; Rieko Aizawa, piano
Chamber Fest, Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA
Program Note:
Run, a one-movement piece for piano quartet, plays on the musical and temporal meanings of the word “run”, with chromatic runs that are rhythmically displaced and crosscut, and with changing and layered rates of fast-paced motion. Respite is brief, as it so often is in our lives. Run was inspired by the perceptual grouping experiments of my husband, cognitive psychologist Michael Kubovy, with particular emphasis on grouping by proximity and similarity; and by the pointillist paintings of Andrew Forge, whose method evolved from an intuitive attraction factor between dots. Both of these sources inspired a fresh look at the perceptual cross-currents of rhythm and pitch. Run was commissioned by the Currents Ensemble and composed during a residency at the MacDowell Artist Colony in 2001. It premiered at the Chamber Fest Festival in Richmond, VA in 2003.–JS