These running passages alternate several times, like panels on a screen, with a broader, lyrical music (owing something to Brahms). The large colorful chords that permeate the piano part (owing to Oliver Messiaen) turn into little running passages, which are played in unison by the Duo. This very virtuosic opening leads to the entry of the piano which starts intensely, and then over a period of 2 or 3 minutes, the Duo goes through transformations that range from fiery, to lyrical, to expressive, to fervent, to intimate. The work starts with an ardent and majestic lyric in the highest register of the cello. This music must be played with all the passion of an emergency. I like music that is alive and jumps off the page and out of the instrument as if something big is at stake. All art that I cherish has an element of love and recklessness and desperation. Whether the venture is tiny or large, loud or soft, fragile or strong, passionate, erratic, ordinary or eccentric.! Maybe another way to say: this is the moment of exquisite humanity and raw soul. One thing that remains the same in my music is that my favorite moment in any piece of music is the moment of maximum risk and striving. I can still smell in the score the musical influences that affected me at that time: Brahms, Messiaen, Debussy, Jazz, and Berg, to name a few. As a composer it is truly interesting to revisit your earlier self like a time warp right before your ears. This was the only thing to do, since if I totally rewrote it now, it would be a completely different work. Rather I decided to 'leave it alone,' representing and respecting the 24- and 25-year old Augusta who composed it.
In making the revisions, I did not re-write the piece, turning it into something I would compose today (now, hopefully as a more mature composer than I was in 1989). I want to thank Kate Dillingham for commissioning this new version and for so beautifully premiering it. Clearly this represents one of my "earlier works’" thus it has been interesting to revisit the music recently and make the revisions which constitute this evening's version. Chant was composed, at the request of Jeanne and Norman Fischer in 1989.
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