This composition for two violins is organised in three short programmatic movements, each inspired by a different Italian adjective associated with feelings of sadness that one feels after a personal loss: luttuoso (“mournful”), malinconico (“melancholic”), and imbronciato (“morose”). These “subtitles” essentially reflect the character of the music in each respective movement. These movements serve as studies in chromatic, gestural two-part writing for the violin. The etudes use the Fibonacci numbers to define both their structure and their emotional arc, creating tension through the resulting musical discourse. The first two etudes are essentially in a “theme and variations” form, while the final etude is a contrasting two-part invention. While each movement is based on a different theme, they do share certain recurring motivic and harmonic similarities, namely the prominence of the semi-tone, which is meant to reflect the mourner’s constant pain. The first etude presents the main theme of the movement, a rueful, lyrical first violin line, which is disrupted by the frenetic tremolando outbursts of the second violin; this is intended to reflect the fact that, given our busy twenty-first century lifestyles, we are rarely truly allowed the time to mourn the loss of a loved one, and are expected to carry on with our daily lives despite the pain and grief we may be experiencing. The second movement instead reflects the moment when we reluctantly finally come to terms with these feelings of less, and let go of them, despite still feeling somewhat bereft; this is reflected by the use of descending pizzicato and harmonic glissandi, which interrupt the melancholic melodic line in the first violin and gradually fade away. The final movement represents the numbness and bitterness that still remains when we are reminded of the passing of our loved ones. Even after time has gone by, and we believe we have finally accepted our loss, the pain we experienced never truly goes away. Although we may seek distraction in the hectic nature of our daily routines, which is represented by the metrically static character of the invention, which contrasts with the free tempi of the first two movements, thoughts of our loved ones still manage to creep through. This work was conceived as an exercise in gesture, and an attempt at more intuitive motivic development and coherence, which was not as solely dependent on pitch, but also on various other parameters, such as register, duration, tempo, and timbre. These studies are also somewhat inspired by my personal research on two of Franco Donatoni’s string quartets: The Heart’s Eye (1980) and La Souris sans Sourire (1988).
