Get the solo piano score here.
In the Summer of 2018, I participated in the Riversong project, a river-rafting/writing/song-writing program led by author Nancy Cook. Our group assembled in McCarthy, Alaska, and rafted a series of rivers until we reached the Copper River and our voyage end at Chitina. My spouse, Jennifer Chung, had done this same program and voyage the previous Summer. On her trip, she wrote a sestina, and I again followed her example.
The sestina is a poem with six stanzas of six lines, concluding with a final group of three lines. The same six end-words appear in each stanza, but in a cycle of changing positions:
- 163542
- 216354
- 354216
- 421635
- 542163
- 635421
The sestinas my spouse and I each wrote during Riversong were poems tied to the experience. While writing my poetic sestina, I started thinking about how sestina patterns could be applied musically. The resulting two short piano pieces take different approaches to this idea. Both pieces also use a favorite randomization tool of mine. Nature develops through a combination of purpose and chance, and I seek to emulate that in my music.
Why “for Wallace”? These little pieces were written for Jennifer to take with her on a trip to the Boston area, where she had the opportunity to revisit our beloved Wurlitzer spinet piano from our years there, whom I had named “Wallace.”
