Fantasy-Variations

Description

Violin, Cello, Piano — The theme that opens my Fantasy-Variations permeates the harmonic and melodic life of the 24 short episodes and coda that follow.xa0 However, in a few sections the relationships with the theme are more hidden than explicit; the fanciful connections between these portions and the opening theme suggested the work’s hybrid title.xa0 Yet even in these more wide-ranging variations the opening theme is usually still hovering nearby, often as a quiet presence contrasting with more animated gestures.The piece may be understood as a kind of dream journal: a chain of brief entries that seem to vary greatly, yet rotate about a fixed constellation of types and obsessions, speaking a language of images at once logical and impossible, familiar and mysterious.I wrote the Fantasy-Variations for the Leonardo trio in 1991 with the support of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in composition.