About
Concrescere (2012),
for string octet and (2013), revision for string orchestra (5.5′)
Program Note
At the beginning of my journey with Concrescere over nine months ago, I could never have imagined what it would become. While it initially began as a loose set of largely discontinuous variations, it developed, almost organically, into something completely different. The title, Concrescere (from Latin; con, “together” and crescere, “to grow”), reflects the work’s process of maturation, by which a series of separate parts grew into a unified, coherent whole.
Interestingly, this developmental process of growing-together emerged out of material that I had initially intended as a musical embodiment of processes of decay. I believe this unintended blossoming had roots in a significant event in my personal life: I owe what this piece has become to Janet Allen Atkinson, my first and dearest piano teacher. In September I received news that she had passed away unexpectedly. Her death had a sudden and profound impact on the development of the piece. Until her passing, I had been writing almost without direction: each variation led seemingly into oblivion, ending as abruptly and inexplicably as it had begun.
This was the major pitfall of writing a music evocative of decay: each individual variation would die away without establishing any audible continuity with the others. In coping with my teacher’s death, I found the solution I so desperately needed. Instead of decaying, the variations grew together through their common motive, creating a living musical form not unlike a clonal colony (a massive single organism made up of genetically identical trees or fungi sprouting from a common root system). The discontinuity wrought by decay has itself decomposed (as I have sought to de-compose it), leaving in its place a fossil: a music of concretion.
Matthew Triplett (revised March 2013)
matthew triplett 