Product Description
The seed for Late Shadow was a melody that
came to my mind while I was waiting to be seen at a doctors office (thank God
for late doctors!). While developing this melody, I decided to experiment with two ideas that have long fascinated me. The
first was to write an entire piece as a canon. Save for an introduction that
foreshadows themes and textures to come, the piece is structured as a
large-scale canon, in which every 8- or 4-bar phrase that is played by the
violin is then imitated by the piano, like an object whose shadow mysteriously
follows it too slowly. This slow echo, coupled with the piece's overall dark
tone, resembles shadows in the evening, which get longer and longer as the sun
sets. The second idea was to use a symmetric form. After the
introduction, the violin introduces a slow, mournful chromatic phrase.
Gradually the music gets more and more dense, fast, and loud until
it reaches a dramatic peak. Then, the piece starts going backwards: the same
phrases are introduced again, but now in reverse order, as the music sinks back
in intensity, folds into itself, and ends with the same initial phrase, this
time played on the lowest end of the piano. The piece was commissioned by the
Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University.
This product was created by a member of ArrangeMe, Hal Leonard's global self-publishing community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. ArrangeMe allows for the publication of unique arrangements of both popular titles and original compositions from a wide variety of voices and backgrounds.