All the Plain of the Sea is Silent (1996-98, rev. 2008)
for 'Cello and Piano
Duration: 12 minutes
Program Note
When I was in my early twenties, I took a three-month hike across France and Spain. Passing through
this environment, slowly, I was often awed by the monumentality of empty landscape. Although I was
a part of it, tiny, in motion, it was untouched by my moving, unmoved by my exertions; the landscape
existed around me, doing what it would do regardless, watching me experiencing it. Hours passed, the
sun would move in the sky, I would move forward, the land remained. Thomas Wolfe wrote, in a passage
I set in Evening Prayer, a 1995 work
for soprano and ensemble that "we are living, hoping, fearing, loving, dying in the darkness while
the great stars shine upon us as they have shone on all men, dead and living, on this earth."
Starting with that work, I wanted to somehow illustrate this idea in music, creating pieces that placed
a soloist within an instrumental environment: one that freely moved through the entirety of pitch space,
was rhythmically active, harmonically rich, and suffused with a present, though not marked beat. Sometimes,
as in the conclusion of this piece, I created an entire environment from a melody, other times, I developed
my environments more freely.
All the Plain of the Sea is Silent for cello and piano began its life as the slow movements of a three movement
Sonata composed in the late summer and early fall of 1997. I began with a freely invented and enormously
rangy 'hymn', and created an environment built on it and a memory of it. The work begins by pulling an earthy,
lyrical melody from the air and ends with that same hymn, unadorned, sounding in a resonant cosmos.
It was revised, and its middle movement discarded, in 2008.
The title borrows from a line of Kristina Chew's evocative translation of Virgil's Ninth Eclogue.
Premiere:
Andrea Yun, cello
Molly Morkowski, piano
13 August 1998
Harris Concert Hall
Aspen, Colorado