My Grouchy Cat
- Instrumentation
- Cello, Piano
- Composed
- 1998
- Duration
- 3'
- Publisher
- Canadian Music Centre (manuscript, RSN 50897; score 6 pp. and part 2 pp.); also the fifth movement of the suite Summertime, Palliser Music Publishing
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About this piece
Sylvia Rickard wrote My Grouchy Cat in 1998 for the Vancouver cellist Christopher Ross-Ewart, who premiered it in Vancouver on 27 November 1998. It is also the last movement of her suite Summertime for cello and piano, where the publisher notes that the pianist plays some chords with the elbows to show the cat's bad temper. Rickard, a vegetarian and animal-welfare campaigner, packs the cello part with slap pizzicato, sliding glissandi, a 'purr and tickle' passage and spiccato near the bridge, set against a molto legato tenor-clef tune, before a fortissimo close.
Technical overview
In 12/8 at dotted quarter = 66 circa, with passages in 9/8 and 6/8, written as a handwritten manuscript in bass and tenor clef. The part is highly chromatic and full of effects: pizzicato and slap pizzicato, a slow glissando on the A string, ponticello and spiccato sul ponticello, and fortissimo tremolo near the end, alongside molto legato lines that climb into the tenor clef. The Canadian Music Centre grades it Intermediate (RCM Grade 5).
Technical focus
- Accidentals
- Collaboration with Piano
- Dynamics
- Extended Techniques
- Glissando
- Legato
- Meter Changes
- Pizzicato
- Spiccato
- Sul Ponticello
- Tenor Clef
- Tremolo