Mirage
Mirage
For solo violin and string orchestra / 2019 / Duration: 12 minutes
Program Note: Mirage is based upon the final movement of a string quartet I wrote several years ago, Four Temperaments. In that movement, I wanted to explore nostalgia – that split-second feeling when one is back in a place or in a time to the point at which it really feels like one is living it again. Throughout the work, the solo violin functions as a type of narrator. In the beginning, I attempted to create music that suggests that dizzying or disorienting feeling that occurs when one is moving further and further down the rabbit hole of a memory. After the opening section, the work imagines that brief moment when we relive the memory but stretched out in time - like hitting the pause button on that split second of heightened nostalgia. Effects and a final solo violin lead us, in a hazy way, back out of the memory to where we began.
Commissioned By: Charles Ives Music Festival
Premiere: Charles Ives Music Festival Artist-Faculty led by Yuga Cohler