After those are clear, “I walk around a lot, and I swim and I think about what the piece is going to be.” As the piece begins to take shape she forms a visual plan - form and proportion are critical, whereas “pitch and rhythm and that sort of stuff is part of the last piece of the process.”Įmblematic of these traits on Tuesday’s program is the composition that shares its title with her new CD: a 50-minute single-movement piece named for the state that bridges wakefulness and sleep. What matters for her are the instruments at hand, which govern the colors she’ll have at her disposal. Perhaps for that reason, Epstein never starts with a prearranged plan or set of harmonic material when she composes. Epstein likes to say that if she had had any talent for the visual arts she would have gone in that direction, and that many of her compositions are best heard as aural paintings rather than as unfolding narratives. Though not written on Feldman’s epic scale, her works - such as “Bloom,” an English horn concerto written for the BSO’s Robert Sheena - are generally slow-moving, their structure and intentionality hidden beneath sounds that are open-ended and ambiguous. I’d never heard anything like it before.”įeldman’s spirit left its mark on Epstein. “It was like, I can’t believe I could actually write music that sounds like this. “When I had the Feldman on, it was like having an epiphany,” she recalled. Lang gave her a long list of required listening, “all sorts of stuff that completely turned my head around.” What hit her most powerfully was Morton Feldman’s crystalline, supremely unhurried “Rothko Chapel,” a revolution in postwar composition.
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