MICHAEL MAEVSKIY

REVERIE (2023)

For Double Bass, Bass Clarinet, Harp, and Percussion

List of percussion instruments: Vibraphone, Crotales (high octave), Bass Drum, Wind Gong, 2 Bongos, 2 Congas, Suspended Cymbal

Duration: 12 minutes 40 seconds

First performance info: June 3rd 2023, in Toronto, ON, ArraySpace, 155 Walnut Ave

Travis Harrison – Double Bass, Colleen Cook – Bass Clarinet, Sanya Eng – Harp, Michael Murphy – Percussion.

Written as part of the 2023 ArrayMusic Young Composers’ Workshop, lead by Linda Catlin Smith

This piece won the 2023 SOCAN Foundation: Young Composer’s Awards, Third Place Prize in the Chamber Music Category

Program note:

reverie is a take on a “fever dream,” an eerie and illusory meandering of the mind. Long, repetitive passages place the listener into the kind of stasis that the mind experiences through a long dream – it is unsure if the dream is going to continue, evolve, or come to an end. The majority of this piece is written using quiet sounds (the dream), contrasted by a sudden outpouring of loud sounds at the very end (like a jolt of consciousness ending the dream). A melody emerges in fragments over the course of the piece, offering the listener a guiding light in an otherwise bleak soundscape.

About the composition

This piece was written over the course of a month while participating in the 2023 Arraymusic Young Composers’ Workshop. This workshop is unusual in that the participants are encouraged to begin the workshop with nothing but ideas. In all other workshops I’ve done, participants were expected to bring fully fledged out pieces to the first day. This format lead to rewarding experimentation and lots of discovery of new ideas.

It is rare to be able to think of a sound that you’d like to have in a composition, write it down, and be able to hear it the next day in a performance of your piece and be able to refine it. There was a lot of “can we try this” and “but can you try to play it differently” or “how many different ways can you produce this sound” in our workshop. That was a refreshing experience from the usual solitary composition process.