Mark Berger (b. 1977)
Landscape (2007)
Mark Berger is composer-in-residence (as well as violist) for the Worcester Chamber Music Society. His note on Landscape follows:
In 2006, I was commissioned to compose a short piece for the chamber ensemble Music at Eden’s Edge in celebration of their 25th anniversary season. The work was premiered at the Peabody Essex Museum, which was hosting an exhibit titled “Painting Summer in New England.” With the idea of painting a soundscape in mind, I set out to create an atmospheric piece – a sort of imaginary landscape in sound. The following year I decided to expand the piece for a performance by members of the Lydian Quartet. During the process of revising and expanding, I was inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem, “The Angle of a Landscape,” in which the poet considers the very limited view as seen from her bed through a gap between a curtain and the wall. The idea that unexpected thoughts can be contemplated and imagined from such a limited point of view was the springboard for my piece, and I treated the very short piece I had previously composed as a tiny slice of a landscape. The piece begins with mysterious chords played entirely in harmonics (even by the pianist!) and gradually spins out in ways quite unexpected, only to return to the same chords at the end.
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