Shepherd, Sean: Trio

Composer’s note: "I decided on a simple enough title for this piece early on: Trio. It's meant to reflect both the number of players and the number of movements that make up the piece. The names of movements themselves might leave one more curious than a quick glance at the title might reveal, and each movement does its best to stand alone, but in my mind these relatively short statements, taken together, make a complete musical paragraph. It’s a piece for an occasion, and one for which I was very happy to contribute: the first concerts in a new concert hall in Boston at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, for the Claremont Trio, old friends and players I knew well. I scoured and researched on the internet, found the design plans of the architect, Renzo Piano, and watched the building grow in photos as I worked at home in Brooklyn. I was taken with the unusual shape of the hall, a vertical cube with four wrapping balcony levels hovering nearly directly over a square stage. The result, as I imagined: there is no front or back, left or right in what was eventually named Calderwood Hall. There is only up and down. I approached the second movement as a metaphor of homage to the hall: most of movement is vertical in nature, as was the intent. While I had focused on technical issues in composing the music, upon hearing it, I was surprised to find I’d hidden my engineering, those load-bearing columns, behind a skin that formed while I wasn’t looking. It was only as a listener that I realized the music in "Calderwood" formed the emotional core of Trio. Florid Hopscotch serves as the intrada, albeit a slightly confused or frustrated one: a leaping staccato gesture starting in the piano argues for prominence with long flowing lines in the strings. Slow waltz of the robots is a pretty blunt take on something that, depending one’s view of such things, might be anywhere from sadly beautiful to horrifying and grotesque. Perhaps the music finds its way toward a bit of both, but the image hit me like a flash after I’d written the last note. I don’t like spoilers, but I’m inclined give this away: any battery-powered objects that would take it upon themselves to attempt such a charmingly useless human act as dancing would likely get a sympathetic view from me, at least until those batteries run out." - Sean Shepherd -