Burning Sled

for seventeen strings (2000)

Composed in celebration of the Corporation of Yaddo's Centennial Celebration, Angels was first performed by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra on May 7th, 2000 at the Ethical Culture Society of New York. Late one evening at Yaddo -- the artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York -- during the summer of 1983, half-asleep while reading Romaine Rolland's Jean Christophe at the foot of a broad staircase that flows downwards from an enormous Tiffany window depicting the woman who, along with her husband, founded the estate, in a pretty white dress bound tenderly at the waist by a pale blue ribbon, I intuited -- in the same way that a driver 'sees' a child streaking out of a suburban front yard into the street to capture a ball -- a woman descending that very staircase dressed in the same flowing white dress. Her right hand was slightly raised, as though holding a candle, a telegram, a poem, or a letter. I believe that I saw an angel that night -- the spirit of Katrina Trask. Accordingly, when I was asked to compose a work honoring the spirit of Yaddo on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of its founding, my thoughts turned to that evening in 1983. Read more>>>