Audio/video recording
Markus Placci, violin. Clark Matthews, horn. Heng-Jin Park, piano
World premiere - Slosberg Music Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA - 5 May 2024

programme note

In the early stages of writing this Trio, I knew I wanted this work to be a departure from my standard practice of writing music in response to an extramusical influence. Trio, therefore, is my first major work primarily about itself.

The titles of the movements, in many ways, reflect my initial impressions of my early sketches of the work. In the first movement Opening (Grains) I was grappling with the challenges of establishing musical openings, and navigating my relationship with cliches and tropes. This movement is disjointed in construction, yet somewhat more sonically cohesive. The individual parts have a sometimes-fractured-sometimes-harmonious relationship with one another informed by the ever-changing relationship between their gestures and the pitch material. This movement also sows the seeds of musical ideas to be explored later in the work (low rumbling piano, warm chords, interplay between repetition and improvisation, etc.).

The second and fourth movements, Tracing the knot and Knot cadenza respectively, are sibling pieces which both exhibit a forward-moving energy and a fleet-footed nature. Both movements share some musical gestures, most notably the “running” piano parts and the use of short percussive sounds in the violin and horn. Tracing the knot, though, is calmer in tone than its related “cadenza” in which I sought out to exploit its more rambunctious elements. In a way, both movements allowed me to play around with sound textures that have fascinated me recently.

The third movement Adorn these artefacts is the result of my deep dive into musical sketches previously abandoned during the early stages of the work’s creation. These “artefacts” were then explored, expanded and intertwined to the point of being unrecognisable from their original forms.

The process of creating the fifth, final (and longest) movement Coda (which follows the fourth movement without a pause) allowed me consider the challenges of a musical ending. How do you conclude a musical work? How do you introduce the conclusion? How do we perceive time when we know we’re in the winding down stages of any time-dependent experience? The first half of the Coda is a kind of time stretched snapshot of a select few pitches in which I attempted to work through my thoughts on this matter.

— Njabulo Phungula