work information
program note

Dark Mother is not exactly a narrative work so much
as an emotional landscape of the Demeter myth, examining four situations which arise from the story. The highly virtuosic opening, Abundance, is marked burgeoning, unstoppable. It depicts a world of unbridled growth before Persephone's abduction, as if flowers, trees, grasses, insects, birds, buds are ceaselessly (and, exhaustingly) bursting forth. The piano swirls wildly as the strings push in and out of the texture. At the close of the movement the strings play a speedy descending figure followed by ugly ‘crush tone’ double-stops as the piano plays loud cluster chords descending from the top of the keyboard to the very bottom depicting the earth opening up to swallow Persephone.

The next movement, Mourning, continues immediately. Demeter's weary misery as she searches for Persephone is expressed in a long, slow melody which gradually coils down, beginning incredibly high up on the violin and ending some five minutes later in the lowest register of the piano. The melody is at first stretched out then, as it compresses, colors and articulations are added; a sobbing glissando figure, a pulsing heartbeat, icy harmonic chords. The melody of this movement is, in fact, the basic material of the entire work. All of the swirling arpeggiated chords in Abundance come directly from superimposing this melody’s pitches, four at a time, to make strings of chords.

These pitches are now combined in another way to make Stasis, the fierce angry dance of the third movement. Again played attacca it is about Demeter's fury and her subsequent blighting of the earth. A succession of fast harsh chords begins to slow down then comes a section for violin and cello alone where a more compassionate impetus is felt. However, the harsh chords return and now freeze and lock until there is absolutely no movement at all.

A brief pause leads to the final movement, Procession–concerned with the creation of the seasons. A tiny snippet of music is heard for spring, then a pause. Next, a tiny snippet of summer music and a pause. Then fall music, and a pause. Finally, winter music and another pause. This happens over and over, the snippets getting slightly longer each time, the pauses getting slightly shorter. Eventually these four seasons join together and the music takes off into a bright revolving dance getting faster and faster.

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