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Dark Days
2016

flute doubling bass flute
string quartet

duration 13'

first performance:
Portland Chamber Music Festival
SPACE Gallery, Portland / January 9, 2017

SCORE  
Movement 1
Movement 2
Movement 3
Movement 4

REVIEW
Allan Kozinn in the Portland Press Herald

PROGRAM NOTE
This work was composed in the aftermath of the 2016 election. The first three movements follow the same disheartening pattern: vigorous music is interrupted and closed down, each time by the same (with my apologies to Sarah Brady, for whom this part was written) inconsequential bass flute solo. Each of these first three movements successively keeps this flute solo at bay for a shorter and shorter time.

Being by nature optimistic, however, and recognizing that all things move in cycles, the fourth movement, played without a break from the third, reverses this action; beginning with snippets of unconnected activity it gradually coalesces to suggest a way out of the closed-in, self-referential world of the bass flute solo.