Ryan Streber - Dust Shelter

The Trio for Flute, Viola and 'Cello was written for Violist Nadia Sirota and is inspired by a book of prints by artist Caitlin Swaim entitled "Dust Shelter". The book is a cycle of six prints that Caitlin made after visiting a tiny cemetery in a remote and barren part of Western Colorado . The prints express a sense of the vast and intimidating sweep of this terrain and at the same time explore the relationships between individuals, families and landscapes. The book seems to represent a range of temporalities from a single moment to several generations, and I wanted to preserve something of this openness in the form of the trio. There is also a tactile quality to the prints which drew me to them: the surface of the paper; the relief of the ink from the drypoint traces; the burnished glow left by the copper plates - all seem to be integral parts of the work. I tried to echo these attributes, especially in the second movement where the most intimate details of the instrumentalists' sound production become fundamental elements of the musical texture. In general, the dynamic flow of the trio - ranging from dense counterpoint to sparse drone-like passages to silence - was also largely derived from "Dust Shelter".

The trio is cast in a traditional 3 movement form (fast - slow - fast) which is in many respects cyclical, despite its outwardly developmental and linear nature. Although much of the music is marked by contrapuntal textures in which all three players share an equal role, the Violist is really the protagonist of the piece. In the 2nd movement, there's an extended cadenza-like passage for viola sparsely accompanied by alto-flute and 'cello. This is the heart of the work, summarizing much of the piece's musical discourse; it is also where the music comes closest to a "tone-painting" translation of Caitlin's book. I'm so grateful to Nadia Sirota, Alex Sopp, and Clarice Jensen for all of their hard work and dedication in bringing this piece to life.