vc. Duration: 10:00

   by Paul A. Epstein

The Great Valley, No. 6a, one of a set of three related pieces for solo strings, was written for the cellist Jeffrey Solow. The Great Valley is an ongoing series of pieces for which the catalyst was La Grande Vallée, a suite of twenty-one paintings by the American Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell.

La Grande Vallée was a real place described to Mitchell by a friend, the composer Gisèlle Barreau, for whom it had been a secret childhood retreat. I think of the Great Valley pieces as imaginary landscapes, not in the picturesque sense but rather as embodiments of structural rules, much as a real landscape embodies its geological, climatological, and botanical structures. Here the rules govern such variables as pitch, rhythm, register, and articulation as well as when and how these may change.