A Glass of Water Lights the World
- Instrumentation
- Cello
- Composed
- 2004
- Duration
- 5'
- Publisher
- Composer (self-published) (Peña Young Publishing)
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About this piece
A five-minute piece for solo cello, written in 2004 for cellist Anna Callner, who premiered it that year. It is a slow, rhapsodic piece with frequent changes of meter and tempo and a quiet close that fades to nothing. Extended techniques give it a contemporary sound: quarter-tone inflections, ad lib. pitch bends, harmonics, and accented chords. In her catalogue entry with New York Women Composers, the composer says it was inspired by a French film of the Oedipus story.
Technical overview
A slow single line ranging from bass to high treble clef, with natural and artificial harmonics, quarter-tone and pitch-bend inflections, short pizzicato figures and accented triple-stop chords. The meter changes almost every bar (6/4, 3/4, 2/4, 7/8, 5/8, 3/8, 7/4, 5/4) and the tempo shifts many times.
Technical focus
- Harmonics
- Double Stops
- Pizzicato
- Meter Changes
- Tempo Changes
- Dynamics
- Hairpin Dynamics
- Spiccato
- Shifting
- Accidentals