Trees

Trees is a work in three movements with a total duration of about 25 minutes. It consists almost entirely of very long, quiet sustained tones in the strings and processed recorded piano sounds in the tape.

My initial idea for this piece was to make a composition for tape and string instruments in which the strings would extend the decay portions of the tape sounds. It was only after I had worked on the piece for some time that I found myself thinking about it as being "tree-like", and the more I worked on it, the more compelling the analogy became. I thought about the sound the wind makes in trees, and about the way they exist in time: we tend to think of trees in terms of space more than time, simply because their tempo, as it were, is so slow. I was also impressed by the beautiful way in which trees, when left to their own devices, arrange themselves.

Trees (for two violins, viola, and tape) is in three movements, each with a duration of around nine minutes. The tape part was created at the Winham Lab at Princeton University.

On Centaur Records: The Composer in the Computer Age VI (CDCM Computer Music Series Vol. 23, 1995). Members of the Cassatt Quartet performing.