Category: Chamber/Solo Pieces (2015-present)

Hexagonal

5 min.

Hexagonal was written for saxophone quartet (soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone). The piece takes a playful approach to working with various patterns of six, inspired by some of the most common and beautiful patterns found in nature. The beehive, and the snowflake, for example, and of course many flowers and leaves are all based on the hexagon shape. Transposing some of these visual ideas into musical phrases, and exploring some of the colour and textural variations in musical language, this piece is very much about enjoying the simplest pleasures that the natural world has to offer.

Hexagonal received its premiere with the Cobalt Quartet on November 16th, 2024, at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, New York, NY, USA.
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Sheet music is available through the Canadian Music Centre.

Merely a Mockery of Spring

cello & piano

3 min. 20 sec.

This piece was conceived as a miniature chamber work for cello and piano, and the title, “Merely a Mockery of Spring”, was inspired by a line of poetry in a cycle of poems about winter by American poet, Robert Pack. The work was performed and recorded with support of the Canadian Music Centre’s BC Region in summer 2023.
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Sheet music is available through the Canadian Music Centre.

September Songs (string quartet arrangement)

two violins, viola & cello

12 min. 45 sec.

September Songs was originally written for erhu quartet (two erhu, viola, and cello)– this is an arrangement of the same piece, for string quartet (two violins, viola, and cello).

The piece is comprised of three movements: “The Hummingbird”, “To the Rising Moon”, and “Tunnels of Light”. The first movement, “The Hummingbird”, captures the light, delicate movements of these tiny feathered creatures. Featuring trills, tremolo, quick rhythmic patterns, and short melodic phrases, the energy of this movement leads into something more calm and a bit mysterious in the second movement.

“To the Rising Moon” opens with the first several notes of a Gregorian plainchant melody found in the “Graduale Romanum” (c. 8th century). This melody develops gently, making use of canonic phrases, and the idea of mirror images—as the moon rises to its peak in the sky, before sinking again behind the trees. This movement was also inspired by a short work by the 13th century poet and mystic, Rumi:

“There is a way
From your heart to mine
And my heart knows it
Because it is clean and pure like water When the water is still like a mirror
It can behold the Moon.”

This gentle interlude melts back into the energy of the third movement, “Tunnels of Light”. Inspired by the ongoing movement of clouds in the sky on an overcast day, and the fleeting moments where the sunshine suddenly bursts through in brilliant, colourful rays– there are several short melodic and rhythmic motifs at work in this movement, combined and recombined playfully.

September Songs was commissioned by Vancouver-based erhu player, Lan Tung, and its creation was funded with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.


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Sheet music is available through the Canadian Music Centre.

September Songs

chamber quartet (two erhu, viola & cello)

12 min. 45 sec.

September Songs was written for erhu quartet (two erhu, viola, and cello), and is comprised of three movements: “The Hummingbird”, “To the Rising Moon”, and “Tunnels of Light”. The first movement, “The Hummingbird”, captures the light, delicate movements of these tiny feathered creatures. Featuring trills, tremolo, quick rhythmic patterns, and short melodic phrases, the energy of this movement leads into something more calm and a bit mysterious in the second movement.

“To the Rising Moon” opens with the first several notes of a Gregorian plainchant melody found in the “Graduale Romanum” (c. 8th century). This melody develops gently, making use of canonic phrases, and the idea of mirror images—as the moon rises to its peak in the sky, before sinking again behind the trees. This movement was also inspired by a short work by the 13th century poet and mystic, Rumi:

“There is a way
From your heart to mine
And my heart knows it
Because it is clean and pure like water When the water is still like a mirror
It can behold the Moon.”

This gentle interlude melts back into the energy of the third movement, “Tunnels of Light”. Inspired by the ongoing movement of clouds in the sky on an overcast day, and the fleeting moments where the sunshine suddenly bursts through in brilliant, colourful rays– there are several short melodic and rhythmic motifs at work in this movement, combined and recombined playfully.

September Songs was commissioned by Vancouver-based erhu player, Lan Tung, and its creation was funded with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.


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Sheet music is available through the Canadian Music Centre.

After the Storm

solo clarinet & string octet

9 min.

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“The air is full of after-thunder freshness,
And everything rejoices and revives.
With the whole outburst of its purple clusters
The lilac drinks the air of paradise.

The gutters overflow; the change of weather
Makes all you see appear alive and new.
Meanwhile the shades of sky are growing lighter,
Beyond the blackest cloud the height is blue.
An artist’s hand, with mastery still greater
Wipes dirt and dust off objects in his path.
Reality and life, the past and present,
Emerge transformed out of his colour-bath.

The memory of over half a lifetime
Like swiftly passing thunder dies away.
The century is no more under wardship:
High time to let the future have its say.
It is not revolutions and upheavals
That clear the road to new and better days,
But revelations, lavishness and torments
Of someone’s soul, inspired and ablaze.”
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After the Storm, for string octet and clarinet, was inspired by a colourful poem of the same name, by Boris Pasternak. The piece was commissioned as part of the HER Projected online festival, presented by all-female ensemble, Allegra Chamber Orchestra. The work received its premiere online on June 26th, 2021, (recorded earlier at the Orpheum Annex, Vancouver), featuring Michelle Goddard- clarinet, with members of Allegra Chamber Orchestra, directed by Janna Sailor.

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Sheet music is available through the Canadian Music Centre.

A Drop of Honey

clarinet, sitar, violin, viola & cello

10 min.

“Hope. It’s like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It’s a fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky…” –Tahereh Mafi

A Drop of Honey was created especially for a subset of the Allegra Chamber Orchestra– one of the only all-female professional orchestras in the world, based in Vancouver, Canada, directed by Janna Sailor. The piece was written for a special concert, “Songs for Scheherazade”, as part of Vancouver’s Indian Summer Festival. A Drop of Honey is loosely based in Raag Charukeshi, a scale used in classical Indian music, with a sharp 3rd degree of the scale, and a flat 6th and 7th. The music develops slowly and gently, through an introduction and a couple of shorter, improvised alap sections in the sitar, building into a steady tempo. Toward the middle of the piece, an ancient pavane melody, “Belle qui tiens ma vie”, by French composer Jehan Tabourot (1520-1595), makes its appearance in the strings and clarinet, before morphing back into the Charukeshi scale. The piece continues to build up to a quick-tempo jhala conclusion.

A Drop of Honey received its premiere by Allegra Chamber Orchestra, with Saina Khaledi (santoor), at the Ismaili Centre, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, on July 15th, 2018.

(Note: the piece was originally composed for sitar, but a santoor was substituted for the premiere performance).
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Sheet music is available through the Canadian Music Centre.

You Dream in Beauty

text by Fraser Nixon

mezzo-soprano, tenor, acoustic guitar, piano, violin, cello

6 min.

You Dream in Beauty was selected as the winning proposal for a new piece, in a composition contest sponsored by Erato Ensemble, a Vancouver-based art song/chamber music ensemble. The piece was conceived as a modern reinterpretation of Luys de Narváez’s Cancion del Emperador, originally written for vihuela, in 1538. Its melodic material is reworked and reimagined here with an expanded instrumentation (two voices, guitar, piano, violin, and cello), and set to a poem written in villanelle form—the villanelle form being something that originated roughly around the same time as the Cancion del Emperador was composed. The poem was written specifically as text for this new piece, by Vancouver-based author Fraser Nixon.

You Dream in Beauty received its premiere by Erato Ensemble, at the Orpheum Annex, Vancouver, Canada, on May 26th, 2018.

Performed by Tim Beattie (guitar) & ensemble, at Stevenson Hall, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow, 6 November, 2022.

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“You dream in beauty
on the western shore
knitting labyrinths
of raveled sleep
I pass in silence through
A stranger’s door

& when you rise, my love
(whom I adore)
what music will you bring
from rivers deep?
You dream in beauty
on the western shore

Here, at harvest, when
what’s sown must reap
the rich man eats his own poor brother
for god is good
& life is cheap
I pass in silence through
a stranger’s door

They who only want to take
will be forever taking more
But love is free to give
& forever ours to keep
You dream in beauty
on the western shore

Where were you—walking slipshod
on some farther western shore?
Your footsteps disappearing
in retreating oceansweep
I pass in silence
through a stranger’s door

Red suns leap over mountaintops
bright as wild lion’s roar
rains fall upon us all
darkened seas
beneath dead moons
who never weep

We dream in beauty on a stranger shore
We pass in silence through the western door…”

Fraser Nixon (1976- )

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Sheet music is available through the Canadian Music Centre.

Watch a video of the premiere performance here:

Dear Nora

solo cello and stereo electroacoustic track
6 min.

When I came across a letter penned by Irish writer James Joyce in the summer of 1904 (22 years old at the time) to his future wife, Nora Barnacle, whom he had just met– I fell in love with these words. I think they express the tender uncertainty of new love so perfectly—something many of us have felt, but few of us could articulate so clearly. This piece was composed for solo cello and stereo electroacoustic track, with Joyce’s text read by Vancouver-based author, Fraser Nixon.

Dear Nora was premiered at the Western Front, Vancouver, Canada, on March 18th, 2017, as part of the Sonic Boom Festival.

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“15 August, 1904

My dear Nora,

It has just struck me. I came in at half past eleven. Since then I have been sitting in an easy chair like a fool. I could do nothing. I hear nothing but your voice. I am like a fool hearing you call me ‘Dear.’ I offended two men today by leaving them coolly. I wanted to hear your voice, not theirs.

When I am with you I leave aside my contemptuous, suspicious nature. I wish I felt your head on my shoulder. I think I will go to bed.

I have been a half-hour writing this thing. Will you write something to me? I hope you will. How am I to sign myself? I won’t sign anything at all, because I don’t know what to sign myself.”

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Sheet music for this piece is available through the Canadian Music Centre.

Two Fiddlers

solo piano (intermediate level)

1 min. 35 sec.

Two Fiddlers was based on a simple, modal melody, intended to recall traditional East Coast Canadian fiddling. The left hand, when it enters, brings a few more interesting harmonies, outside of the modal scale the right hand is using. Partway through the piece, the left hand (or “second fiddler”) crosses over the right hand on the keyboard and takes up the main melody. Metrical changes, offbeat accents, and the tradeoff of melodic material between the “two fiddlers” add to the playful spirit of the music.

Sheet music is available through Syrinx Press:

https://elizabethknudson.ca/syrinx-press