21 minutes, 30 seconds
2019

This piece was composed for John McDonald and Lilit Hartunian. It seems strange to say that composing a piece with barlines and complete coordination between the instruments should be an unexpected thing to do; but, given the pieces I wrote leading up to this one, that’s certainly the case. What could motivate such a thing? The answer: pure practicality. In this case, the musical ideas simply required it. In the first section, the two instruments truly act as one. The brief middle section is a kind of minimalist (not in the musical sense) pas des deux. And, while an alternative notational approach could easily be called for in the vast final section (the two instruments really do explore distinct worlds), making a switch midstream would have been artificial. In a manner not at all dissimilar to the otherwise unrelated work for piano four-hands from 2004, that last section simply opens a window on an ongoing (and never ending) stream of music—and, again for practical reasons, ultimately closes it.