Enchiridion

for solo viola
Commissioned by Colin Sorgi
Premiere: Colin Sorgi, viola
TBD - TBD - TBD
​Duration: 4'

​     When Colin Sorgi approached me to write a piece in response to Bach’s Third Cello Suite, I knew immediately that I wanted to concentrate on the Prelude movement. I’ve always been amazed at Bach’s precise knowledge of pacing and textural variety throughout his music for solo strings. The Prelude from the Third Cello Suite is immaculately structured in its textural and motivic development, despite its concise three-and-a-half minute runtime. I was also drawn to the odd path the Cello Suites took into the canon. After Bach’s death they were regarded as etudes and largely inappropriate for a concert presentation until Pablo Casals perfected them in the early 20th century. The rest is history. It was with this foreknowledge that I decided that my approach to this piece would be like that of an enchiridion, hence the title. Enchiridion is an archaic Late Latin term referring to a small handbook or manual. The word itself was fashionable to describe small descriptive treatises, yet fell into obscurity after the Middle Ages. To me the term has a mythic, almost quest-like connotation, which is in turn reflective of the path that the Cello Suites have taken over the past 300 years from seemingly pedestrian and mundane to mythic and cosmic. In writing this piece, every bar is a distortion of the material from the respective bar of Bach’s prelude, with the master’s material fighting through the various permutations and obstacles that are placed in its way, until it ultimately succeeds in coming to the forefront at the end of the piece.