Coffee Will Be Served in the Living Room
- Instrumentation
- Cello Ensemble
- Composed
- 2018
- Duration
- 10'
- Publisher
- Canadian Music Centre (unpublished; printed by CMC)
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About this piece
A ten-minute work for eight cellos commissioned by the Women's Musical Club of Toronto and dedicated to cellist Simon Fryer. It was premiered on 3 May 2018 at the club's "CelloDrama!" concert in Walter Hall, Toronto, and won the Canada Council's 2020 Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music. The piece depicts one evening in the life of Jackson Pollock: after Hans Namuth finished filming him at work, a drunken Pollock overturned the dinner table, and Lee Krasner told the stunned guests that coffee would be served in the living room. In Murphy's programme note the cellos try to keep up an appearance of normality while the music builds agitation and sadness. The score mixes metred writing with unmeasured, cue-driven passages and calls for sul ponticello, tremolo and harmonic effects; at one point two players put down their bows to play music boxes.
Technical overview
No technical overview is available yet.