The Green Mountains

About this piece

Gwyneth Walker wrote The Green Mountains, a four-movement suite for solo cello, as a tribute to her home state of Vermont, the Green Mountain State. She finished it on 3 March 2010 in Braintree, Vermont. In her programme note she writes that the open New England countryside suits a solo cello: "The wide range of the cello captures the breadth of panorama." She describes The Land as "a simple melody" inspired by "sparseness and openness" and The Spirit as a hymn that ends "triumphantly, rising to heaven." Mountain Music is "rough-hewn," and in it "the composer, cellist and audience are in the woods during this music, tapping, sawing and dancing!" Erica Lessie of The Cello Museum chose it as an intermediate-level pick and recorded the first movement. She rated it "mostly intermediate, with a few advanced passages" and noted that the movements can be played separately or as a suite. Walker posts the score as a free PDF on her website.

Technical overview

Four movements, about 15:30 in all (9 pages of music): 1. The Land (3:40), 2. The Life (3:45), 3. The Spirit (4:00), 4. Mountain Music (4:00). The tonal writing combines singing slurred lines and quick arpeggiated string-crossing figures with double and triple stops, rolled and strummed pizzicato, and left-hand pizzicato. It also asks for natural harmonics, sul tasto and sul ponticello, tremolo and finger tremolo, and tapping on the instrument, flicks and foot taps. The range reaches treble clef, with thumb-position passages in movements 2 and 3, and the meters change between 3/4, 4/4, 6/8, 12/8 and 2/2.

Technical focus

• Legato
• Detaché
• String Crossings
• Bariolage
• Double Stops
• Pizzicato
• Harmonics
• Shifting
• Thumb Position
• 2 Note Slurs
• 3 Note Slurs
• 4 Note Slurs
• Dotted Rhythms
• Rhythm
• Rubato
• Dynamics
• Hairpin Dynamics
• C String Notes