Flüsse-Einflüsse is German for Streams-Influences. The con­cept of the con­ver­gence of mul­ti­ple streams of influ­ence is impor­tant to me, because I am a clas­si­cal com­poser coming from a jazz and pop back­ground. Sim­i­larly, the 2004/2005 DAAD Sound Under­stand­ing con­cert for which Flüsse-Einflüsse was writ­ten fea­tured both clas­si­cal and jazz per­form­ers. This idea of mul­ti­ple streams con­verg­ing is car­ried through­out the piece on sev­eral levels, from the mate­r­ial (taken from two of my favourite jazz tunes but reworked clas­si­cally), to the inter­ac­tion between per­former and com­poser (some sec­tions are writ­ten out, others are impro­vised), to the inter­ac­tion of reg­is­ters, tex­tures, and formal elements.

Four Pieces for Accor­dion and String Quar­tet was writ­ten between the summer of 2002 and the fall of 2003. It was inspired by a series of poems called Swerve, by Cana­dian poet Sarah Lang. There are four poems in the series, which tell the story of a woman watch­ing her lover die of cancer. Four Pieces is ded­i­cated to my grand­mother, Antoinette Schulte, who was an accor­dion­ist and died of cancer when I was a child.

What inter­ested me about Swerve was the sen­sa­tion of the pas­sage of time con­veyed by the narrator’s emo­tions. I felt this had strong cor­re­la­tions with musi­cal form, and I wanted to try to trans­late the emo­tional form of Lang’s series into an instru­men­tal piece. There­fore, each poem in the set cor­re­sponds to a move­ment in Four Pieces, and each move­ment closely fol­lows the con­tent of the cor­re­spond­ing poem in Swerve.

Four Pieces was also my first suc­cess­ful attempt at the pur­pose­ful jux­ta­po­si­tion of dis­parate har­monic sys­tems. I wanted to be able to draw from a palette of func­tional and non-functional sonori­ties rang­ing from pop­u­lar music and jazz, to medieval, clas­si­cal, and twentieth-century West­ern music. I achieved this goal by plac­ing har­monic and melodic ideas in new local con­texts or by using the func­tion of one har­monic system with the mate­r­ial from another. Exam­ples include the osti­nato 6/3 chord in the first move­ment, trans­posed up a quar­ter­tone, and the func­tional cadence that ends the piece, dis­guised by dense pitch clus­ters and non-triadic sonorities.

listen to Viñes Passing Through

A mash-up by Steve Layton that uses Four Pieces.

Other sources: Ricardo Viñes – Menuet Spectral & En Verlaine Mineur, Christ­opher DeLau­renti – Tiger, Sara Peebles – Music for Incan­descent Events Joseph Drew – He Was a Poet