Piece for Flute and Strings
| ensemble | flute, guitar, and cello |
|---|---|
| movements (and duration) |
I. The Fairest’s Lullaby (~4:05) II. Forest Nightmare (~4:16) |
| score | PDF, 372KB |
| alternate arrangement | violin, piano, and cello |
| performance history | 05/02/1994 (undergraduate senior recital) by Rebecca J. Tait, Matthew Lavanish, and Matthew Radcliff |
| date completed | 1994 |
background
The first movement of this piece was so saccharine that I found myself introducing things just to make it interesting. It worked fine with the title (and subject matter?), but it was almost more useful just as prologue to the more mature second movement. Neither movement is unusual in form (AABA for both movements, basically). The original program notes add a little more insight:
Piece for Flute and Strings is a two-movement tale. The first movement is a simple ternary piece that ends on the dominant after a phrase modulation. The guitar plays a variation of the A theme that includes a phrase from the song "Someday My Prince will Come," from Disney's animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Programmatically, the first movement serves as the lullaby for Snow White as she falls into a poison apple-indeuced sleep. The second movement is the nightmare that she invariably experienced while sleeping; is it somewhat hypnotic rhythmically and tonally more discordant than the lullaby. Any truly effective witch/evil stepmother/sorceress would cetainly not have let Snow White sleep serenely.
- program notes, 05/02/1994