Composer’s Note:

My second sonata, The Big Room, began as a solo work. The piece which is now the work’s middle movement was written in the Spring of 1993 at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, in a studio overlooking the Mediterranean. The audible rhythms of the sea were a constant stimulus for me, and especially at night, the fullness of the star-dappled sky and the powerful surge of the waves suggested a scale of natural activity far beyond my usual daily experience. This breadth, deep rhythm, and mystery suffused the piece. I found myself wanting to write music which captured that sense of a vast space, one large enough to accomodate any musical gesture, and large enough for various gestures of past musics to reverberate gently. (It helped that the studio itself was especially spacious and evocatively lit at night, a literal “big room”.) But I also felt that this piece, while satisfactory as a evocative tone poem, was in fact the seed for a larger work. In October 1999 I found myself at the Aaron Copland House in Cortlandt, New York, on the banks of the Hudson during one of the most glorious autumns of my memory. At this point the structure of the larger piece clarified, and I was able to “frame” the earlier work with two movements. In the