Xanadu, for violin, cello and piano (2000)
Duration: 12’
MP3 Player
Score excerpt
Premiere:
Members of the Phoenix String Orchestra, violin and cello / Leo Wanenchak, piano
Louise Shonk Kelly Recital Hall, Dublin School, Dublin, NH
Summer 2000
Performers in audio recording:
Recording from the premiere
Program Notes:
This was my “Festival,” or final, composition from my time spent at the Walden School for student composers in the summer of 2000. The summer of 2000 was a revelatory five weeks, where master teachers opened my eyes to the masterworks and compositional techniques of the twentieth century that I had never heard and could never have imagined. I tried to grapple with all those new ideas in this composition, titled Xanadu after Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem “Kubla Khan.” The composition is in three movements, but due to the rather extreme demands I placed on the performers (not knowing any better at that time), they were only able to prepare the second movement, subtitled “The Mingled Measure,” to a point of near-completion. The other movements have never been performed.
— August 2010