Program Note:

Three Sisters is a set of inelegant, drunk and disorderly dance tunes. They lie somewhere between the regular, motoric Irish jig beat branded onto the soles of my feet through Irish dancing lessons, and what I actually set out to respond to; a Norwegian Hardanger fiddle set of springar dance tunes called the Systerslått, (which pertains to a myth about three pagan sisters who were turned to stone by an angry minister because of the noise of their cavorting out in the fields). The rhythm of the springar dances are uneven, with some beats unequal in length to others, so I set out to solve the Springar rhythm riddle. In the end, however, I just composed rhythms I perceived the Springar dances to embody, and embraced the confusion along the way. I was very interested in the melodies of the dances, and the hardanger fiddle tuning. The melodies of the springar tunes come from somewhere vocal. They seem like they were once sung and singable, but they traverse into a realm of unsingability through both the rhythm of the dance, with its sometimes obsessive repetitions, and the emergent harmonies from the tuning of the fiddle. I wanted to latch onto these ephemeral melodic and harmonic moments, like scrolling through a waveform and time stretching a microsecond.