Trio Serenade (2019)

music by Bruce Lazarus
commissioned and performed by Kurt Kaufman (cello) and Emily Ferguson (oboe), with Bruce Lazarus (piano)
1. Chaconne
2. Last Spring
3. Sleeping Dalias
4. Murmurations
The opening chorale in the piano has relations, imperfectly remembered phrases, to a plainchant I had come across in the early 1990s but have not been able to find since then. The words were something about the unity of the cosmos, perhaps created by a single guiding hand. As an agnostic I can’t speak to the existence of a creator, maybe yes, maybe no, How should I know? But it’s a marvelous sentiment.
The second movement is based on a movement from a not-very-successful flute/piano sonata from about 1990. (The one on my EP is an entirely different piece.) I’ve always heard something good in these materials and the Serenade seemed like a good opportunity to see what’s there. Composing the movement was like seeing 1990 through 2022 eyes. Aside from adding a third voice, the main melody was streamlined, “essentialized”, various thematic fragments given a different contour, harmonies contemporized, rhythms slightly more syncopated, whole episodes occurring in different orders, and just before the end an entirely new, very calm section was added to replace the bombastic phrases of 30 years earlier.
In 1976 I composed - in an hour or so on my 20th birthday! - a tiny waltz in the manner of Satie. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but my little Gymnopedie somehow found its way back into my life again and again: as an encore at my 1986 Carnegie Recital Hall concert, an example of Satie-like phrasing in choreographer Janet Soares’ Modern Dance Forms (a book/cassette mostly based on the work of Louis Hors)t, an incidental waltz for a Strindberg play directed by Mary, and a new, melodically essentialized, harmonically amplified version as Memories of 1977 in my To Be Specific anthology of short piano pieces. I couldn’t resist setting one very last time as the third movement of the Serenade, and it’s the most elaborate version of all with all its added elements, almost unrecognizable from the original at this point.
The finale is built entirely from new materials composed in 2021 expressly for the trio. Mary and I are fascinated by murmuration, the balletic motions of thousands of birds, an entire flock moving almost as one. I take it one step further though, the birds come in for a landing at the end of both sections, strutting about and chirping on the ground. To quote Mary’s favorite lines from Gertrude Stein, “Pigeons on the grass, alas.”