“Alba” (2019) – Jocelyn Morlock (1969-2023)
Alba was written for meagan&amy, for their 2019 Canadian tour, as a companion piece to the Mozart violin and piano sonatas.
While writing it, during the longest days of summer, I found all my musical ideas had a strong association with dawn. Alba is a very sunny piece, which begins quite gently but becomes increasingly heated and energetic over its brief duration.
Verbivores (logophiles? the wordily-inclined?) will also note that the name Alba sounds suspiciously, and intentionally, reminiscent of “Alberti bass. »
In writing a companion piece for Mozart, I used the building blocks of his music – a judicious amount of trills, ornaments, triadic harmony, and especially the Alberti bass – to develop my own work. Small, regular ripples of melody that are initially created using these figures become faster, more irregular, and even distorted by wide leaps and bounds, but retain traces of their origins even at their most exuberant.