We are excited to continue our collaboration with the New York Women Composers (NYWC). This month, we present a piece by  Whitney George.

Bio

From her website:

“Whitney George’s music traverses the affective terrain between tragedy and ecstasy, fragility and strength, bringing together romantically delicate intimacy and the spectacular darkness of the macabre. Haunted by ghosts and/of love, George’s operas, staged multimedia works, and chamber music coloristically explore the mysteries of irrationality, nightmare, and memory, sonically seeking lost objects and hidden subjects.”

Featured Work: “Cracked Looking Glass” from Night, Like Velvet: In Twelve Letters for violin & cello

COMPOSITION DETAILS

• Title: “Cracked Looking Glass” from Night, Like Velvet: In Twelve Letters
• Composer: Whitney George
• Year of Composition: 2013
• Instrumentation: violin and cello
• Movements: 2nd movement of a 12 movement set for various chamber ensembles
• Duration of Work: 9.5 minutes
• Number of Measures: 234
• Number of pages: 8
• Tempo: Starts quarter note = 42; many metric modulations
• Difficulty Level: professional due to all of the meter changes and double, triple, and quadruple stops, but could be played by an advanced student
• Highest Position Reached: depends on fingerings, but it doesn’t go into the upper range of the cello.
• Techniques Employed: double-, triple-, and quadruple-stops; Bartok pizz; frequent meter changes
• Publisher: Self-published
• Where to Purchase the Score: www.whitneygeorge.com
• Cost of Score*: $30.00 (downloadable score and parts)

Recording

Program Notes

“Night, like velvet: in twelve letters is an interdisciplinary eletroacoustic work in twelve movements. George began the project in January 2013, constraining herself to write one movement each month throughout the year. Evoking the productive tension between process and product, George’s compositional procedure becomes both a nostalgic mediation on and active sonic articulation of the passing time. A full performance of the work could imply a linear narrative. However, the overarching series of affective sonic events made available by this work is highly indeterminate from the perspective of both performers and audiences.

Each movement of Night was written as a musical letter to someone in George’s life. The instrumentation for each movement takes into account the makeup of her ensemble (the Curiosity Cabinet), the dedicatee(s) of each movement, and her desire to include differentiated timbral combinations throughout the cycle. Mirroring the non-linear, indeterminate nature of memory, Night’s monthly letters can be performed in various orders, each of which brings out different structural and expressive relationships.

A selection of poetry or prose from Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes accompanies each movement. Though George chose texts from different periods of each writer’s life—some when they were romantically involved and some not—she maintains a thematic focus on displacements of time, fragmentation rather than cohesion, and the alternately despotic and wonderful meanderings of communication between lovers. In the composer’s full score (which is excessively colorful due to her penchant for highlighting meter changes), as well as in each instrumentalist’s part, lines or words of the selected texts are correlated in time with specific musical moments. In a sense, these texts are a silent continuo part being juxtaposed with the music, but they are only “heard” through realization by the reader/listener. While Night is a deeply personal reflection on the emotional and creative life of its composer, it is also a fragmented, flexible narrative, an indeterminate sonic journey with the potential to evoke the memory of different experiences in the minds of its listeners.” – Whitney George

A Collaboration with the New York Women Composers (NYWC)

The NYWC series at the Cello Museum was created to showcase its members who have composed various pieces for cello, informing cellists seeking new music to add to their repertoire, and helping listeners find new favorites. Many thanks to the NYWC for this wonderful collaboration.

Read other installments in the series here.

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*Prices are accurate at the time of article publication, but the Cello Museum cannot take responsibility for subsequent price changes.