On December 2nd, 2014, my Dad lost his battle with cancer. In memoriam is a piece about the emotions that we all went through after he was diagnosed in 2014. Although the work flows attacca from one movement into the next, the piece is technically “divided” into two halves: “Threnody” and “Adieu.”
Threnody’s opening conveys anger, sadness, and confusion with a bold B-flat minor chord in an octave leap, a sigh motive, and a maelstrom of wild altered scales and jagged trills. Most of the movement’s material comes out these fierce opening bars. The movement is written in A-B-A’ form whose middle section features an acrobatic conflict between accented beats of three and four sixteenths. At the final return of the A, I modified the sigh motive by adding a bend between the two pitches to enhance its potency. The final return of the A comes to a climax and then floats into the ether (a sea of timbre trills), transitioning into the second movement.
Adieu (goodbye) is a celebration of life
