JE: A Muralfor solo piano[5:28]This work was inspired by John Elliot's mural, Yesteryear on the Hudson. Painted outdoors at Burd Street, Nyack, NY in 1984, it won the only ever Friends of the Nyacks Arts Competition. Its image, Yesteryear, is online at the Hudson River Valley Heritage site. Documentation on Elliot's work overall, including films and many published writings, can be accessed at JohnElliot.com.
My music has four movements, reflecting on the painting's principal motifs. Comments below on its composition are grouped to parallel.
1. Mountain Meets River
2. Steamboat (Chugs & Flaps)
3. Sunbursts
4. Man in Skiff
1. With middle-D symbolically as the shoreline, nearly broken chords in the treble ring over compatible linear flow in the bass. Harmonies, essentially two, alternate downbeat ~tonic and upbeat ~dominant. There are three 12-bar subsections, each with its treble second half inverted (for the river's reflection), yielding modal alternation per phrase. Chord pair members are chosen for increasing cragginess in their melodic succession. Bass figuration per bar meanwhile changes almost perpetually.
2. "Flaps" (single-staff passages) represent the boat's flags: Elliot's "JE" pennant at the bow, its characters mapped to the pentatonic scale; and Old Glory at the stern, its vintage-1848 star field mapped to the chromatic. The patterns separately rotate and expand, then merge for a mutual buffeting.
"Chugs" conjures the engine sounds of two riverboats in passing each other. Their shared two-bar motif repeats perpetually but with unequal interim pauses, yielding phase shift such that the motifs re-juxtapose always differently: the first series nudges them into sync; the second takes them out again.
3. Each bar consists of one downward-rolled chord, notated to indicate hand distribution. Each chord contains two intervals, alternating until just short of pitch-class redundancy. No two interval parings are the same. The V-shaped bottom-pitch succession is meant to suggest the mural's pattern of sunbeams striking the river surface.
4. Not least among Elliot's achievements was his place as a mandolin virtuoso and as concertmaster of the Bloomfield Mandolin Orchestra, then conducted by Gabriel Navola. He videotaped this melody from a hospital bed shortly before his death. I have attempted to emulate the performance, adding counterpoint to imagine his carrying - as surviving grandson of Tsar Nicholas II - bits of Mussorgsky in the back of his mind.