Chopin’s Ocean
orchestra
instrumentation: 2(II=picc).2.2.2-2.2.1.0-timp.perc(2)-pno-hp-strings
duration: 8 minutes
Chopin’s Ocean was read at the American Composers Orchestra Underwood New Music Readings at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre in NYC on June 14, 2016.
Listen to a reading excerpt and see the score at the ACO’s EarShot Composer Archive
Program Notes:
In 1949, my grandmother, mother, and aunt were on a ship traveling across the Atlantic, displaced by WWII, and far from their native Estonia. My grandmother used to tell me how she was summoned to the ship’s officers’ quarters, the captain having learned that she was a concert pianist. As the unbolted piano bench slid back and forth, and the boat rocked and heaved, my grandmother poured her pains into the piano, playing Chopin’s third Etude, known to her as “Chopin’s sorrow” She was lucky, traveling aboard a stout ship in a time when the US was actively welcoming displaced persons. But these days, as I hear about migrants desperately floating across the Mediterranean in an attempt to get to Europe, it is easy to imagine my grandmother, or someone like her, not making it; I imagine a storm sinking the ship and the sounds of her piano spreading out across the ocean. And I imagine far away, a mother and daughter standing by the seashore, and hearing just a faint glimmer of Chopin, drifting in the waves.