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Programme Note

Tribute (In memory of Sidney Albert 1909-1989), a duo in one movement for violin and piano, was commissioned by the McKin Fund in the library of Congress and was premiered there on October 28, 1988 by Edna Michell and Frank Glazer to whom I have dedicated this work. I wrote Tribute during the summer of 1988 and, like most works I have composed in recent years, it came very slowly at first (six weeks to complete the first three minutes) and, mercifully, very quickly in the end (three days to finish off the remaining seven minutes). Not exactly an inducement to build confidence or enthusiasm over the prospect of beginning a new composition, one need hardly add. But strangely enough, starting to sketch out something fresh, something filled as yet, with unknown musical potential and co-mingling it with other, perhaps older sketches that not, as yet, found a home in a complete work, is as intriguing a period of creativity as it is dismaying. In the beginning, it is not the paucity of ideas that frustrates forward progress but rather their abundance that overwhelms and disorients one’s capacity to find their inter-connecting forms of elaboration and succession within a given musical space. It is even the need to discover to what piece and to what movement within a particular piece a given idea belongs that can create confusion and uncertainty. Simply stated, all efforts at efficient musical thought are undermined during this initial period and steady work in some other occupation seems an enviable prospect.

Tribute revolves on a dual axis comprised of two lyrical themes that generate the other musical ideas appearing throughout the ones movement work. The first theme is given over to the piano in the opening, and the second theme is announced by the solo violin on the heels of this opening piano section. Both themes are developed and elaborated upon, woven in and around one another, until they are, at length, transformed into thematic character more dramatic and rhythmically driven than their lyrical forebears. You’ll know you’re near the end when a hymn-like section commences in the piano after a genuinely loud climatic section, and is then joined by the violin in a concluding moment of that hymn.

--Stephen Albert