GIVERNY, SUNRISE (2016) - for clarinet and violin

Premiere: Giancarlo Latta and Thomas Frey, Rice University, Houston, TX, April 2017

Duration:  ca. 6 min

Program Note:

Giverny, Sunrise is inspired by Claude Monet’s Poplars series of paintings. In each of these paintings, Monet explores lighting effects at different times of day, bouncing off poplar trees. Colors blend in unexpected shades, creating a blur of purples, reds, greens, and oranges. This work conveys the explosive combinations of color in the light, blurring harmonic areas and tonalities into the sense of one complete picture rather than a multitude of separate ones, as well as a sense of pervasive transparency and pastel colors. To achieve the sense of color with only two instruments, the work depends on the sounds between the notes—air, clicks, slides, bow sounds, and other playing techniques that serve to color the sense of harmonic blur. In this work, one can imagine this burst of color and activity upon the sun rising.