Violin Concerto

Program Notes

I began writing this violin concerto during a three-week artist-residency at the Leighton Colony at the Banff Centre over the winter break of 2005. The formal structure of the composition is a traditional concerto form: three movements with a cadenza finishing out the slow middle movement. Much of the pre-compositional effort was to create musical ideas that could spin into spatial and temporal issues.

The spatial qualities of the work correspond to a harmonic language based on the open strings of the violin, all built on intervals of the perfect fifth. While at Banff, I came up with the idea of "broken fifths," stacked fifths with minor seconds "cut into" the normal series of naturally occurring intervals. Thinking back, I suppose I was pondering why some trees did not grow tall and straight, but appeared incised or broken at certain points. Early on in their growth the tree probably suffered damage. But rather than dying, the main stem found a way to straighten out from the nearest axillary bud. The cycle of events were then repeated: broken, straightened, and so on, and each time resulted in a different vertical structure.

A sonic experience in the mountains can be related to points of sound heard over time, repeated and bouncing back and forth: cycles of echoes, long or short, sudden or predictable. Echoes is the subtitle of the Violin Concerto, and relates directly to the dialogue that occurs between violin and instruments within the orchestra, including the notion of echoes from the distant past (musical ideas referenced from earlier movements), often discursively, sometimes directly and simultaneously.

Performances

-University of Iowa, October 27, 2009
(Dávid, University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra
William LaRue Jones, conductor)

-Quito, Ecuador, April 30, 2009
(Dávid, Ecuador National Symphony Orchestra
Emmanuel Siffert, conductor)