| clarinet, violin, and piano | 2016 | |
| 11 1/2 minutes | ||
Audio: Ensemble Triopolis: Kimberly Cole Luevano, clarinet; Felix Olschofka, violin; Anatolia Ioannides, piano |
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Paul Klee’s painting Abstraction with Reference to a Flowering Tree (1925, oil on carton, in the collection of the National Museum of Art in Tokyo) can seem to a 21st-century eye like an assemblage of large pixels of different colors. These approximate rectangles follow irregular, curved trajectories, unevenly breaking the 10 x10 “resolution” of the outer edges into clusters of smaller, brightly colored rectangles. Their curving boundaries conspire with the relations of color to lead the eye in irregular rhythm and flowing movement, traveling toward the brightest hues – reds, greens, whites, pinks, and yellows, each subtly different from every other – that evoke the image of the title, seen through the lens of Klee’s abstraction. This creative reinvention of a familiar image resonates with my own ways of reinventing familiar music. Klee’s painting also disrupts the sense of of scale, giving the feeling of an image seen close-up from far away; this led me toward obsessive reinvention of small gestures within the context of a vast expansion of time, like a close view of a beautiful image through a tiny and elaborately flawed lens. The “flowering tree” to which my own work refers is a twelve-bar excerpt from a violin sonata by Giuseppe Tartini. Abstraction with Reference was written for Ensemble Triopolis (clarinetist Kimberly Cole Luevano, violinist Felix Olschofka, and pianist Anatolia Ioannides), to whom it is dedicated with gratitude and admiration.