Performed by Alex Russell, violin, and Joel Clifft, piano, for the College Music Society Conference at Azusa Pacific University on Feb 25, 2022. Published by Ars Nova Press, available at https://tinyurl.com/4yx5p3va Duality ©2021 by Phil Shackleton, All Rights Reserved. You can listen to it here, or you can click one of the timings below to straight to that movement on Youtube.
Three movements: 00:00 I. Non troppo veloce 03:53 II. Non troppo lento 09:09 III. Come un pipistrello fuori dall’inferno “Duality” for Violin and Piano, was composed specifically for the performers, Alex Russell and Joel Clifft, during the Covid shutdown. It reflects influences from jazz, Ravel, Poulenc, Milhaud, Kapustin, Latin American rhythms, hoedown country fiddle, Stéphane Grappelli, Dave Grusin, and, of course, the blues. This may not be the complete musical universe from which licks were, uh, borrowed (some might say warped), but it’s close. Like many three movement works, the order of tempi is fast, slow, faster. In fact, the 3rd movement is marked “come un pipistrello fuori dall’inferno” (with apologies to Professor Schickele). The three movements are each ternary forms. The 2nd movement is moderately Gallic in its sensibilities, if not its specificities. In my defense, I was somewhat depressed while composing it. (What could be more Gallic?) The 1st and 3rd movements both make considerable use of double stops in places, in a sort of bent hoedown effect. Some of this resulted from having the violin replace the right hand of the piano during piano melodic leads. The end of the 3rd movement throws off the disguise and features the violin on a pure open string hoedown while the piano reprises some of the harmonic language of the 2nd movement, which, oddly, works with all four strings. Imagine that.