The Hunt by Night (Etude for Trio No. 3)

This is (or will be) the final work in a set of 21 linked but autonomous works, containing all combinations of clarinet, cello, and piano. A Book of Etudes manifests performative potential across multiple axes, expands on the etude-concept; the technical challenges of Chopin and Liszt become composerly in Debussy and Ligeti's. These etudes presume virtuosity as a given, and focus on the 'technique' of performing together; Etude No. 3, Quire 7 is a modern caccia wherein the temporal orientations of the three musicians are bundled and re-bundled, the players shift roles from pursuer to pursued, from leader to outsider, from furious precision to savage confusion

The subtitle ("The Hunt by Night") has two sources: Paulo Ucello's 1470 eponymous painting, and Mahon's poem of the same. Uccello plays with the symmetry and flatness, as the colorful images of a hunt filled with hunters, horses, dogs, horns; a chaotic but directed energism is set before the cold, rigid lines of the forest soon to envelop them. Mahon's poetic exegesis transits back and forth, moving from the childlike play of the foreground with its pageantry, color, and the anticipation of the hunting horn to the dark interior of the forest, Crazed no more by foetid /Bestial howls." as the hunt is transformed, " horses to rocking-horses / Tamed and framed to courtly uses."

The work was written for Ning Yu, Ben Fingland, and Caleb van der Swaagh, as a frustrating love-letter, marking and challenging their supreme musicianship and most excellent commity.

~from : newfocusrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/the…-by-night