Still Life with Fallen Stone
solo violin
duration: 5 minutes
“Still Life with Fallen Stone” was written as the imposed work for the 20th edition of the George Enescu Enescu International Competition in 2026.
Program Notes:
This spring I visited the Valley of the Temples, a vast archeological site in Agrigento, Sicily,
which features a series of massive temples dating from the 5th and 6th centuries BC. Some of
the structures are surprisingly well preserved, some have been rebuilt or reassembled over
recent centuries, and some are nothing more than a series of immense columns and stones
strewn across the ground. “Still Life with Fallen Stone” begins here, on a bright Sicilian
morning: blue sky, a gentle breeze and a jumble of stones and pillars sitting quietly amid
grasses and buzzing insects. The music begins with lyrical but fragmentary gestures, spanning
the full range of the violin. Living in Italy this last year, I have gotten used to the almost casual
way in which ancient buildings and objects intersect with modern life. But everywhere one
looks there are tiny clues—the colorful splash of a fresco on a crumbling wall, the weathering
on a marble step, a broken piece of sculpture—that open doorways to past ways of life. I find
myself constantly trying to tell stories about the past, to imagine lives different than ours. Like
so many fragments of sculpture or masonry being reassembled, this piece gradually coalesces.
As I wrote, I thought about the way our reconstructions of the past are largely reflections of
ourselves, and I found the music transforming into an Estonian regilaul or runosong, a folk
song style and ancient singing tradition that is a part of my family’s heritage. For a brief
moment a wild version of a regilaul emerges—the tune I quote comes from a series of
transcriptions that my great-grandfather, August Kiiss, made in Southern Estonia in 1908 and
1909)—before the music fragments again. Phrases of different Estonian folk songs mix with
gestures from earlier in the piece, and the music of the opening returns, as if, after a brief
glimpse or dream of another world, we return to the morning sunlight of Agrigento and its
stoic, ghostly ruins. “Still Life with Fallen Stone” was written as the imposed work for the 20th
edition of the George Enescu Enescu International Competition in 2026.