JAVS Fall 2011

Pre-Rehearsal Preparations

a diagram of his piano/percussion setup as well as photos of him playing, so they all knew which instru ments were available and how they were positioned. One of the composers, Karl Blench, told me later that he had recreated Danny’s setup (without real instru ments) so he could mime playing what he had writ ten, figuring as long as he could play everything, Danny probably could, too.

Once the music started arriving as PDF files in our inboxes, we set to work looking through the parts. There were a few things that were impossible for Danny, but surprisingly, the majority of it was playable. Most of our requested changes were in the layout of the scores: because Danny had to read a minimum of three staves at once (two for piano and at least one for percussion, but sometimes as many as six at once), he had very specific requests for the lay out of his part (ex. 1). My parts, as would be expect ed, were much more straightforward, and very little had to be changed. Later in the fall, Danny was traveling around the united States playing a program of piano/percussion solo music that had been written for him. At a concert at the hartt School of Music in hartford, Connecticut, Danny mentioned our Trios for Two project. After his performance, a composer approached him, saying that he had written a viola sonata that he would love to rewrite as a viola and piano/percussion trio. Would we be interested in adding it to our pro gram? Danny asked him to send us a score and record ing, and we would consider it. The piece, Luna , by Aaron Krerowicz, is (very) loosely based on Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata. I was immediately skepti cal that it would be an amateurish caricature of Shostakovich, but I was quite wrong and fell in love with the piece, from its bombastic opening to its calm, yet heartbreaking second movement. We agreed to play it. “Do we have too much music now?” we asked each other. It was a funny problem, considering we had once worried that we might not get enough! In the beginning stages of this project, my doctoral advisor had raised the issue of why composers would want to write for a combination that had little chance of repeat performances by other musicians. Most of the composers solved this problem by writing pieces that were possible for two people but could also be played as “real” trios. One of these, Karl Blench’s piece, I actually performed in both configurations. As would be expected, some things were much easier with two separate people playing piano and percus

Final program of music from the Trios for Two Project

The only hurdle left was to figure out when we could rehearse. We lived in two different cities—I was a full time student at Rice; Danny a piano professor at CalArts—so we wanted to minimize missing any of our academic and other professional commitments. We decided we would spend two weeks at Christmas rehearsing intensively and then again in March during the week leading up to the concerts we had scheduled in houston and Los Angeles for later that month. If we had been putting together a concert of standard reper toire, this would have been plenty of rehearsal time. We just hoped that it would be enough to put together music for a newly invented chamber ensemble.

J OuRNAL OF ThE AMERICAN VIOLA SOCIETy 42