SKU: PR.114418250

UPC: 680160640959. 9 x 12 inches.

In 2011, Barbara Garrop, my mother, commissioned me to write a piano trio in memory of Norman Garrop, my father, who passed away about thirty years ago. When I started brainstorming about topics for the piece, I found it difficult to recall many moments of my early life involving my father. Too many years had passed, and the memories that I could summon were of achild looking up to her father, not an adult relating to an equal. However, while collecting stories of my father from various family members, along with discovering a number of objects that had once belonged to him and that I had stored away in boxes decades ago, I began to realize that this piece wasn't so much about my father as it was about my re-discovering the man that he was: a loving husband and dad who cared deeply about his family and his passions (which included bike riding, collecting coins, strumming our guitar, playing baseball, watching football games, entertaining people, helping to run local theater and puppet productions, and carving objects out of wook); an accountant who dreamed of a better future: a treasurer of our local synagogue; an early advocate for computers (we owned an Apple II+); and a pranster with a great sense of humor. Ultimately, I decided to musically tell the story of my search for these memories. In the first movement (Without), a child calls out in a sing-song voice, searching for her lost parent. This search intesifies over the course of the movement through a series of themes, including a stepping motif in which a two-note progression steadily climbs higher, a pseudo-jewish folksong, and a passionate longing theme. The child's search becomes increasingly intense throughout the movement, calling out fervently and repeatedly to the parent; the movement ends in a moment of great tnesion and uncertainty. The second movment (Within) quietly opens with the lost parent finally answering, represented by a solo cello; the child (now personified by the violin) has found the parent within the sanctuary of her own heart. This movement highlights the joy and solemnity of this beautiful discovery. -S.G.

SKU: BT.MUSM570360130

English.

For Violin and Cello. Published 2008. Dedicated to Peter Sheppard Skaerved and Neil Heyde. This music was composed during my DAAD residency in Berlin in October — November 2007. If I were to describe it in one sentence, I would say that it is based on the idea of 'two things seen/heard as one'. a2 (a due) is a well-known term to musicians; it is often found in orchestral scores indicating a given passage that is to be played by two instruments of the same family. Although violin and cello could well be regarded as 'first cousins' of the string family, the literal implementation of the term a2 as a 'compositional strategy' would have been too much (!) for a piece of chamber music consisting of no more than two players. Not surprisingly, this never happens in this work; in fact, the opposite is true: regardless of how it appears on paper (i.e. on one or two staves), the music for each instrument is constantly based on two layers. This musical 'interpretation' of the title gives an indication as to how the textural format of the piece operates. However, this was by no means the only thought that 'preoccupied' my mind whilst composing this music. Berlin made a profound impression on me. The remnants of the wall in Bernauer Straße and the cobbled two-stone line tracing the wall across where it once stood — a clear reminder of what not so long ago there were two different worlds in one city — provoked a strikingly dramatic effect. Border, death-strip, killing, and escape to freedom had a particularly evocative resonance, especially of the time when I lived for three years in a remote town in Southern Albania right at the border with Greece. There, there was a nameless road whose destination the authorities did not want you to know, but the locals called it the 'death-road'. In no way programmatic, in this context, the extra-musical dimension of the principal idea is very much part of the piece. Here, the musical and extra-musical interpretations cannot easily be separated, for they are two parts of the same thing: a2. As if to add another dimension to this idea, there are two versions of this piece: for viola & cello and violin & cello. The first version was premiéred by Garth Knox and Rohan de Saram at the 2008 Intrasonus Festival in Venice..