5 players: pno, string quartet - The Impulse Wants Company

Ensemble: piano quintet

Duration: 22 minutes

Commissioned by: BalletCollective for American Contemporary Music Ensemble

Premiered: The Joyce Theater, NYC, New York

Published by: Yes Daedalus Music

Note:

The Impulse Wants Company represents my first collaboration with choreographer Troy Schumacher and BalletCollective. It is structured around a commissioned poem of the same name by my friend Cynthia Zarin. The music is organized in five short movements for piano quintet. One challenge of adapting a poem into an instrumental work is how to represent the source text through such a different, inherently more abstract medium. For The Impulse Wants Company, I took an impressionist approach to this problem, imagining sound worlds that evoked the natural and emotional landscapes she evokes with her delicately tangled lines.

This was my first commissioned work after college, and it began a long creative relationship with BalletCollective.