JAVS Fall 2011

A LTERNATIVE S TYLES T RIOS FOR T WO

We wanted to perform our concert at least in houston and Los Angeles, so we decided to commis sion works from three composers in each city. Anticipating the amount of work that would go into the performance of these pieces, we wanted to commission works from composers whose music we both felt strongly about. After we had listened to the music of many Rice and Los Angeles composers, I contacted the three Rice composers we wanted to write for us: Karl Blench, Casey Cangelosi, and Chris Goddard. All three immediately gave us an enthusiastic yes. We had half of our program! Of the LA com posers we picked, two agreed to write for us, Daniel Corral and Ingrid Lee. Danny mentioned a piece he had recently heard by a colleague for violin and woodblock that he loved and could very easily envision working for viola, piano, and percussion. The composer, Andrew McIntosh, gave Danny permission to arrange it for our combination, so now we had a full program of music. We commissioned the works in May 2010, with a due date of September 1. Through the sum mer, we would get periodic updates from the composers, sometimes asking if certain ideas were physically possible for us (mostly Danny) to play. Fortunately, Danny had sent them

From left to right: Molly Gebrian, viola and Danny Holt, piano/percussion

by Molly Gebrian

of viola chamber music: trios for two people.

When I arrived at Rice university’s Shepherd School of Music in 2008 to begin my doctorate in viola, I learned that one of my degree requirements would be to com plete an independent project of my own design. I called my close friend Danny holt, a pianist living in Los Angeles, and asked him if he would like to do a series of con certs with me. We had been good friends since we were fifteen and yet had never played together. Both of us had been deeply com mitted to contemporary music since we were teenagers, and in our initial conversation we agreed that a concert of new music for viola and piano would be the most interesting and musically satisfying to both of us. I never would have guessed that we would end up inventing a whole new repertoire

Around the time I arrived at Rice, Danny had begun experimenting with playing piano and percussion simultaneously. Although mainly a pianist, Danny had also played and studied percussion for most of his life and reasoned that since the piano is a percussion instrument, why not just add something extra to it? A handful of pieces had been written for him in which he played piano and percussion as a kind of avant-garde one-man band. Both of us wanted to do something unique that audiences wouldn’t hear every day for my project, so we chose to commission trios for viola, piano, and percussion with the stipulation that the piano and percussion part had to be playable by one person.

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