Melia Watras

FRANCES WHITE: AS NIGHT FALLS
for violin, viola, narrator and electronic sound (2012)

World Premiere: Michael Jinsoo Lim, violin; Melia Watras, viola; Sheila Daniels, narrator; January 13, 2014, Meany Theater, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Program Notes:
As night falls is the third in a series of works for strings with texts written by James Pritchett. In all three pieces, the texts are about roses: sometimes lists of rose names, sometimes fanciful, poetic stories about roses. The original piece, The Old Rose Reader, was framed by a narrative that described a man reading about roses to his wife; the second piece, The book of roses and memory, acts as a kind of reflection on and remembrance of the first piece.

In As night falls, we wanted to do something different. We had always imagined the stories being told by the man, and began to wonder what it would be like to create a piece from the woman’s perspective. The text that resulted from this plan exists in two layers, background and foreground. The background appears in the electronic part, read by a male voice: it consists of fragmentary, somewhat abstract poems derived from the rose stories of the previous two pieces. The foreground is read by the live female narrator, and is much more realistic and emotional, consisting of the woman’s memories and reflections on a long marriage that is now coming to its end with her approaching death. As she moves in and out of various stages of awareness, sometimes hearing her husband’s voice as he reads to her, her thoughts wander, sometimes alluding to events that are only suggested, sometimes clearly describing emotions or memories.

The other two works of the series share some musical materials. In As night falls I refrained from alluding to these materials – instead, I tried to create music that is in the same sonic world as the other pieces, but has a completely different feeling and texture. Because this is a duet, I inevitably found myself thinking of the violin and viola representing, in some sense, the couple in the story: but they also create a kind of commentary on the text, that magnifies and empathizes with the human condition of the characters.

As night falls was written for Michael Jinsoo Lim and Melia Watras, with funding from The New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

—Frances White