centro

centro

Violin and Piano
Duration: 9:00

 

Program Notes:

In Rome, history is present to a tangible degree; everywhere, one is bombarded by insistent whispers of past presences (or present pasts?), relentless reminders of one’s own mortality.  Anyone who has stood at Piazza Barberini, or any of the numerous other piazzas in the Centro will understand.  This is a multilayered temporal experience: ancient, medieval, renaissance, contemporary. The paradox of human time and life’s fleeting nature is juxtaposed against man’s monuments, built to exist forever.  In this work, the avant-garde coexists with the post-modern; each is informed by the other, juxtaposed, treated to hyper-imitation and timbrally bent toward or away from the other until the influences overwhelm and subsume the individual identities within the work.  With its abrupt shifts and constant recasting of the same material into different connotations, centro also might suggest the inner, continuous centering of the self in relation to one’s surroundings, physical and metaphysical.  centro, the second work in the Monumenti series, was written in December, 2005 at the American Academy in Rome for Karen Bentley Pollick and Ivan Sokoloff.  It exploits their prodigious talents.

Premiere: February 12, 2006
Karen Bentley Pollick, violin, and Ivan Sokolov, piano
TransMagiNations / Washington Composers Forum Transport series
Consolidated Works
Seattle, Washington

Recordings: Tightly Wound: Music for Strings, innova 965