A Poppy of Erasure › 2015
violin, viola, bass clarinet | 6:50 | for Dinosaur Annex
premiere: Dinosaur Annex; April 26, 2015 at MIT Museum, Cambridge MA
n o t e s
A Poppy of Erasure is a musical response to artist Nathalie Miebach's "The Ghostly Crew of the Andrea Gail," a drawing which doubles as musical score. "Andrea Gail," like much of Miebach's work, establishes parameters which she derives from meteorological data—in this case the Halloween Storm and Hurricane Grace which sunk a fishing vessel off the coast of Gloucester, MA, in 1991. I used data from Miebach's work as it is represented in her score to build the skeleton of my trio. The skin of the music is a freer interpretation of "Andrea Gail" and the story surrounding it.
The title refers to a popular bit of wordplay in 17th-century Japanese poetry; the word keshi means both "to erase" and "poppy", playing on the impermanence of human action and the transience of nature.
score: pdf download | hard copy
