vibrant life

Description

Duration

12 min.

Program Notes

vibrant life was commissioned in honor and memory of Margaret Baxtresser by Music at the Farmstead for the Summer Festival Orchestra at the Conrad Botzum Farmstead in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio. She was a truly fine pianist and teacher whose solo and collaborative work and perceptive mentoring was a profound influence on musicians and music lovers in northeastern Ohio and beyond for many decades, and – as with so much of my work (which straddles the knife edge between warm sentiment(…ality) and the cold, strict romance of structural geometry and proportion) – the title, like the score itself, is a hypertext proliferating in multiple directions: vibrating strings (piano, cello) and a column of air (flute) are implicated in this work, along with references to many aspects of her inspiring life and personality – her voice, repertoire, travels, kindness and breadth of experience.