Black Mountain Trio
A lot of my work from the 1990s referenced my relationship with my father, who died of a brain tumor when I was two years old. His youthful death could easily lead many to assume I had no relationship with him, but even no relationship is a kind of relationship, with repercussions and ramifications. Certainly the tangled emotions that occupied my home at a time when I could scarcely be expected to grasp them have left deep traces.
I am reminded of those traces by an upcoming performance of Dirges and Dances, a piano trio I wrote in 1998. The Black Mountain Trio (Philip Bush, piano; Kevin Lawrence, violin; Brooks Whitehouse, cello) will be playing it on a concert with music by Beethoven and Dvorak this Sunday here.
Dirges and Dances is a three-movement exploration of the interdependency of joy and sorrow. The first movement is a mournful dirge built from a quiet thrumming that alternates between simple consonance and veiled dissonance. The musical materials of the dirge are then transformed in the next two movements, a pair of dances: one dark and vigorous, the other joyful. The shadowed world of the first movement is never distant, though, as the energetic action in these two dances occasionally veers into pensive reflection.
This is a moving example of how you have made your life one with your music. At the time I composed From Hills of Snow for meruvina, using piano, Indian percussion and tamboura timbres, together with Just Intonation, I was distraught by what appeared to be the end of a personal relationship. There is also a connection with the passing of a father, as the piece was inspired by an Indian raga, Bilaskhani Todi, composed by Bilas Khan in the sixteenth century for the funeral of his father, Tansen, a legendary musician who was among the Nine Jewels in the court of Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great. Father and son had been estranged for years, and Tansen’s hand or entire arm miraculously moved with a gesture of forgiveness as the music faded into silence.
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