Wild Silk

PROGRAM NOTES:

Wild Silk for Baritone Saxophone, Percussion and Piano (2009) was commissioned by Jeffrey Heisler for the Primary Colors Trio, who premiered the work during the thirtieth annual Bowling Green State University (Ohio) New Music Festival in Bryan Recital Hall on October 24, 2009.

While composing this work, I found inspiration in the strikingly beautiful and elusive Luna Moth. The form, character, and instrumentation of this piece follows its surprisingly violent life cycle, from: egg to caterpillar, pupa, and adult moth. In the first stage, the caterpillar grows rapidly, passing through five instars by breaking through its own skin five times. It then forms a silken cocoon, within which the pupa wriggles noisily during metamorphosis. Once the adult moth emerges, it must focus on the crazed goal of propagation. Deprived of a mouth, it is only a matter of hours or days until the imago will perish from exhaustion. Without any way to nourish and sustain itself, the adult’s sole purpose is to replace its ephemeral generation with a new one just as fleeting – a form of renewal that seems, to me, to mirror the constant self-reinvention that human artists undergo as the world changes around us.

Many thanks to Jeffrey Heisler, Isabelle Huang, I-Chen Yeh, and Brian Amer for their artistic support of this project. In 2011, the International Alliance of Women in Music Search for New Music recognized Wild Silk with an Honorable Mention for the Theodore Front Prize. A forthcoming recording by the Primary Colors Trio was made possible through a faculty grant and the 2019 Julie Olds and Thomas L. Hellie Faculty Award for Creative Achievement at Linfield University.

–  Notes by Andrea Reinkemeyer and Sabine Ganezer

PERCUSSION:

Percussion: Glockenspiel, 4.3 Marimba, Large Concert Bass Drum, Bongos, 2 Temple Blocks, China & Sizzle Cymbals