Recombinant
Recombinant is a little musical Frankenstein's monster. To compose this piece, I took a handful of blues "heads", threw them against the wall, and then glued the pieces back together. Or rather, I let fragments of those heads float around in my brain, bumping into one another and sticking together to form a not necessarily cohesive whole. As a result, the piece fluctuates wildly between extremes, from percussive to lyrical, from driving syncopation to free-floating syncopation. There's a lot of syncopation, actually. But it's simple, really; you start with a basic 7/8 pulse, then you lose a 16th note in the middle of the measure and gain it back at the end. Or did you mean measure 56?
Metrical irregularities aside, I was not wholly haphazard in my construction of Recombinant from spare parts. Despite jumping from one thematic idea to another, I maintained the general harmonic outline for the blues throughout the piece. The finer details of the harmonic progression, however, are much more fluid: I might stretch a single chord out of proportion, gloss over the motion between two or three chords, or repeat a two-chord progression simply because I had two different ways of working out the progression, and didn't want to decide between them. Nevertheless, the piece can be audibly divided into four choruses, according to the overall harmonic structure.
Although Recombinant is never lacking in energy, I do try to continually ramp up the intensity over the course of the four choruses, adding in textural, timbral, and registral constrast as the piece goes on. By the time the fourth chorus rolls around, the music is nearly spilling over with exuberance, and very nearly runs aground at the climax. Instead, the cello intervenes with a few low notes, and the trio safely winds down to a halt. Recombinant was originally composed for the Triple Helix piano trio, and the title, borrowed from genetics, alludes to both the method of composition and the origin of the group's name. After a reading by Triple Helix, I decided that portions of the piece needed to be reorchestrated. Nearly all of my own performing experience has been in wind ensembles and bands, so the combination of multiple string instruments is less familiar to my inner ear. Nevertheless, I feel that I succeeded at my primary goal in writing Recombinant, which was to make the violin and cello an equal partner to the piano in terms of percussive force.
