vln. Duration: 11:00

   by Paul A. Epstein

The Great Valley, No. 6b is one of a set of three related pieces for solo strings. 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.