SCENE IN FOUR PARTS
for solo cello
date: 2024
duration: 10’
first performance: 17 April 2024; LeFrak Concert Hall, Queens College, Queens, NY; Richard Jimenez, cello
availability: not currently available
recording: NA
NOTES
Scene in Four Parts is cast in four movements, each played attacca:
I. Prelude, with adrenaline
II. Recitative
III. Gauze and Tar
IV. Soliloquy
Prelude dwells exclusively on extended pizzicato techniques derived from my experience as a guitar player. I have always felt that guitarists and cellists have a lot to learn from one other. Among other things, cellists can teach guitarists how to "sing" via their instrument; guitarists can teach cellists a variety of right- and left-hand plucking methods that go beyond the trove of standard, bowed string instrument pizzicato techniques.
Recitative is a dialog between two ideas: a short, spiccato motive derived from the opening material of the Prelude, and a new, more lyrical melodic theme. The two become increasingly intertwined and developed before culminating in an aggressive and exuberant march-like section that takes advantage of various percussive bowing techniques.
Gauze and Tar introduces a new melodic fragment, played in harmonics, embedded among wispy-textured gestures that make use of "air sounds" and glassy harmonic glissandi. This new melodic fragment is the basis for the theme that emerges in the final section of the piece, but not before the lyrical material from the Recitative section returns, this time in a much slower tempo, and with some modest contrapuntal and harmonic development. A pizzicato figure that makes use of the new melodic fragment emerges as a ruminative interruption of these proceedings, and establishes itself as the thematic material for the final movement.
In Soliloquy, the pizzicato figure from the preceding section distills down into a steady ostinato that serves as an accompaniment to an expansive descending melodic theme that echoes the harmonic passages at the opening of Gauze and Tar. The ruminative pizzicato interruptions reassert themselves amidst additional melodic development before dissolving into granular particles over a steady drone that ultimately fades into air.
I am grateful to Richard Jimenez for commissioning this piece from me, and for the fruitful friendship and collaborator that has emerged from it.