mercurial planes

Program Notes

When writing this piece, I found myself interested by the potential of singular, solitary notes. mercurial planes is about treating a note as a surface or plane, on top of, under, and around which gestures can occur. This piece explores how pitches can be implied but not played, inferred from melodic contours and negative spaces through different methods. mercurial planes achieves this in two different modes, one slow and one fast. The interplay between the distant nature and delicacy of the first section and the playful virtuosity of the second section speaks to two different ways in which we can understand the 'mercurial.' One can be mercurial by being coy, but one can also be Mercurial, if we let our imaginations run wild. The meditative sections which bookend the piece are based around the speculation of what a distantly Mercurial ode could sound like.