During the summer of 2018, violinist Lynn Kuo and I met to discuss the possibility of performing a chamber recital together, one that would feature a brand new commission for violin and piano. During one of our planning sessions, Lynn – on a whim – sketched out the phrase “If life were a mirror…” This tantalizing clause, which begs several questions (a mirror to what? what would we see?), eventually became the overarching theme of our concert as well as the title of the work itself.
I am fascinated by the relationship between the external, ‘objective’ world, and the domain of the inner psyche. How much of what we perceive is a function of what is ‘out there,’ and how much of it is informed by memory, thought, imagination, and the often distorted lens of our own perceptions? In this work, I wanted to explore the idea that the our outer and inner worlds are fundamentally linked – that life, meaning the reality we experience, is indeed a mirror of our inner lives.
This entailed a deep dive into the realm of the subconscious – and in particular the world of dreams. In order to do this, I gave myself explicit permission to not only follow my instincts, but to suppress (as much as I could) higher-order decision-making processes, especially processes that had to do with maintaining order and coherence. In other words, I strove for a kind of ‘dream logic,’ where musical events follow one another in ways that might make very little sense on the surface, yet would (hopefully) feel intuitively correct. In this goal I was aided by a collection of short stories by the German author Michael Ende, called Spiegel im Spiegel (“mirror in the mirror”); the bizarre and often disturbing surrealism that characterizes these stories greatly inspired the tone of this work.
The resulting work is like a landscape strewn with familiar musical artifacts, in the form of quotations and ‘stylistic memories’ – fragments of music that are not direct references but that evoke specific musical styles and eras. The piece opens with a kind of broken chaconne; the instruments start off in the ‘wrong’ role, so to speak (the pianist declares a series of violinistic triple-stops, while the violin accompanies with an Alberti-bass), thus setting up the mirror metaphor. After a series of starts and stops, in which the performers pretend variously to go off script, have memory slips, and grow frustrated with one another, the music coalesces into an energetic romp that pivots between progressive rock licks, hints of the Bach-Busoni Chaconne and Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals, and a wild tango. The section culminates in a series of Beethoven quotations, before collapsing into a murky extrapolation of Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba. This leads to a serene quotation from Confessions, a piece I wrote in 2017 shortly after the passing of my cousin Alex. Shortly afterward, the theme transforms into a fugue, which then reaches an apocalyptic climax in which the chaconne fragment is reprised. A final echo from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is heard, beneath a stratospheric violin line, before fading into nothingness.
If Life Were a Mirror… was completed in early February of 2020, which would also mark the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s death. I feel that its undercurrent of bleakness would anticipate the year that was to follow, where crisis after crisis appeared not only to trigger, but to reflect, our collective inner demons.
