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Looking for Answers

for violin, cello, piano and electronics
premiered February 5, 2011
Mojave Trio: Sara Parkins, violin; Margaret Parkins, cello; Genevieve Feiwen Lee, toy piano
19th Annual Ussachevsky Festival, Lyman Hall, Pomona College, Claremont, CA

sheet music available at http://composers.com
Recording available on Albany Records and iTunes

Movement II, "Contemplation":

 

". . . a truly blockbuster piece, and one of the best works I've ever heard that combines electronics with a traditional chamber music scoring and language."

–  Carson Cooman, Fanfare Magazine

". . .crystalline in certain moments and speckled with percussive detail at others."

– Ron Schepper, textura.com

"Spare, unsettling, but very effective, with its exaggerated amplification and distortion, it is a piano trio haunted by its own shadow."

-Barnaby Rayfield, Fanfare Magazine

Looking for Answers augments a standard piano trio of violin, cello, and piano with electronically manipulated sounds derived from the same instruments. The sonorities and certain stubbornly recurring intervallic structures in “Frozen Questions” seek answers with serious but nearly paralyzing determination.

In a series of inwardly spiraling thoughts, “Contemplation” interacts with and is often swept away by an electronic fog of modified piano sounds. “Dance” shrugs its shoulders and turns its back on the quest, mixing dance rhythms from several continents and cultures. Perhaps this is the only appropriate answer.

Looking for Answers
was written for the radiant Mojave Trio.