Adrienne and Amy

Description

Violin, Piano — Judith Tick (biographer of Ruth Crawford Seeger) asked me to write a piece in honor of Adrienne Fried Block (1921-2009), who was Amy Beach’s first great biographer. Judith pointed me to this passage from Amy Beach’s letters:“One of the sweetest of my recollections…was when I was ten… I met Edgar Rowland Sill, the poet. When he heard that I was the lucky possessor of absolute pitch, he asked me to go out with him in the spring mornings, and steal from the birds! Professor Sill, whose ear was true, had been collecting bird melodies. I shall always remember that first spring morning. The poet and I sat down behind a stone wall. It is a sweet memory of the kindlypoet, of California, of the spring flowers, of the unconscious birds…”Adrienne and Amy, the natural world they lived in, the professor, the artist, the historian they became, the tended garden of their lives. These are the ideas I have tried to explore in this piece. Some of the musical material is directly taken from Amy Beach’s famous piano piece A Hermit Thrush at Morn. Composed as a double tribute to Amy Beach and her biographer Adrienne Fried Block (and commissioned by Ruth Crawford Seeger’s biographer, Judith Tick), Elena Ruehr’s ADRIENNE AND AMY is at times hypnotic, at others playful, aggressive, mercurial, or sweet. Its three imaginatively titled movements are wonderfully different from each other, and equally engaging for both instruments. According to Ruehr, some of the piece’s materials are developed directly from Beach’s beloved “A Hermit Thrush at Morn,” and all of the ideas were inspired by “Adrienne and Amy, and the natural world they lived in; the professor, the artist, the historian, the tended garden of their lives.” For advanced performers.