for violin & piano
duration: 24’
Noah Fields, violin, and Sar-Sharlom Strong, piano, perform ‘lone tree,’ ‘allegheny,’ ‘neversink,’ ‘turk’ and ‘the pond.’
MOVEMENTS
big branch
high ridge
lone tree
neversink
painted post
pine
saco
skannatati
spy
the pond
turk
PROGRAM NOTE
This is the second set of Overlooks, which are miniatures named after specific high places I’ve been. As in the first set, each movement is inspired by a particularly vivid or meaningful memory of a being in specific geographical high place - sometimes with people who are important to me, and sometimes by myself.
These miniatures act as a kind of journal, then, capturing something of my experiences in particular landscapes. But I’ve left any specific personal content, aside from the names of the places, out of these pieces. I hope that my specific experiences can stand in for our collective sense and understanding of these landscapes, and of the act of remembering small moments in our lives that would otherwise go overlooked and forgotten. There is something powerful about high places, places where we can see far more of a landscape than we usually can—where we come to understand both our small place in the scope of the natural world as individuals, and also the enormous and, sadly, ever-more irrevocable impact our collective human society has had on it.
PERFORMANCES
July 2, 2023, Society for New Music, First Presbyterian Church, Cazenovia, NY. Noah Fields, violin; Sar-Shalom Strong, piano (lone tree, neversink).
February 9, 2024, Society for New Music, Onondaga Community College, Syracuse, NY. Noah Fields, violin; Sar-Shalom Strong, piano (lone tree, allegheny, neversink, turk, the pond).