HALFBIRD Program notes

Here are some ways to listen to HALFBIRD:

HALFBIRD is expressive music, made for this day, this occasion, and for this audience. My intention in making this music has been to make something for you, for today, that is absorbing and vivid, and that creates a space for sharing inner experience - mine and yours - in the way that only music can. We are each half of the music.

HALFBIRD is speaking, arguing, resolving, and moving on. It is about interdependence, limits, and a kind of struggle to find true life, whatever that is exactly. It expresses the desire to merge the unmergeable. 

HALFBIRD is not a character, not exactly the protagonist of the piece; but there is the sense of a creature struggling to live inside and through the music. Perhaps there is a living being called Halfbird. That would be a kind of monster, which fits. 

HALFBIRD expresses a life that is split in halves; a life the entirety of which can only be grasped in the combination of two separated things. The two violin parts, each of which requires the other in order to be fully comprehensible, express this most noticeably. 

HALFBIRD reaches for resonance, for a tuning that fits. These are the parts of the piece that use a system called Just Intonation. The purpose of the Just Intonation sections in this music is to create the deepest possible resonance. In those moments, discrete things come as close to merging as they possibly can.

Thank you for listening.

Players, Duration, Form

Zach Matteson - Violin
Nick Montopoli - Violin
Michael Zapruder - Electronics

Duration: 12”

Movements (played attacca, or without breaks between them):
1. Wild Flight
2. The Well
3. Halfbird