Blood Under Winter-White Skin

€30.00

for violin, cello, and piano

10 minutes

Download includes pdf of score and parts. Download here.

first performed by the Fidelio Trio, at Taplin Auditorium, Princeton, NJ (USA), November 2014

“This performance was given by doctoral students from the Royal Irish Academy of Music and the Paris Conservatoire featuring works by Boulez, Saariaho, Andriessen, and Irish composer Amanda Feery. Amongst such illustrious company, Feery’s piece entitled Blood Under Winter-White Skin for piano trio more than held its own. It began with rapid alternating glissandi on the strings which tended upwards and remained a recurring feature throughout. The most striking section occurred near the end where the strings shimmered over a largely static alternating pattern between the right and left hand of the piano. According to Feery, the piece grew out of an experiment to see how much expressivity could be extracted from this alternating piano pattern. The answer, it turned out, was a great deal, and many audience members of this well-attended concert were quite clearly moved by the piece.” - The Journal of Music

Program Note:

The title of the piece comes from a lovely thing artist Dorothea Tanning said about her painting, A Mi-Voix. She says of the painting, ''I just wanted to paint a white and grey picture that would still have color in its veins as we have blood under our winter-white skin''. Before I sat down to write the piece I improvised a rough piano part. This improvised piano material, for the most part, quickly alternates between the left and right hand, similar to the hand motion you might adapt when playing a percussion instrument (like a bongo drum). I think this gesture is slightly restrictive in terms of the technical and emotional possibilities a player can express, but I decided to see how much life and expressivity I could coax out of it. The result is that the piano acts like a gossamer layer over the strings, but changes in light, shade, and expressivity within the idea of the gesture. The strings in the piece act as the fluid underneath because they can. They're free from the boundaries of the fixed gesture as well as the fixed tuning of the piano.