1) Pas de Quatre (1994) for flute/alto flute, violin, cello, and piano The New York Camerata 2) Canyons (1993) for chamber orchestra Polish Radio National Symphony Joel Eric Suben, conductor 3) Ehre (1988) for violin Gregory Fulkerson 4) Hemispheres (1989) for cello and piano Chris Finckel, cello; Christopher Oldfather, piano About these works, Eleanor Cory writes: My music derives from many inspirational roots. Sometimes the impulse is purely musical; a melodic gesture. a chord progression, an instrumental color. Just as often I have been energized by a place. a painting. a poem, a person, or a feeling. Usually. after an Initial spark, the compositional process lakes over with the Initiator receding in Importance and reemerging from time to time, often after the piece is completed. The four pieces of this CD were written over a five-year period. Their sources come from different periods of my life. Their styles are diverse. What they share is a concern with contrast, both emotional and musical, and an attempt. to Incorporate extremes within the same piece. The result is one-movement pieces with smaller sub-movements suggested by tempo. harmony, dynamics, colors and registers. "Pas de Quatre" (1994) began with a series of Improvisations In which I incorporated harmonies and scales associated with jazz which I heard in the fifties and sixties. I wanted these elements to move in and out of a more expressionistic musical domain. I was intrigued by the idea that if chords were rearranged spatially and put in different orders, they would be transformed from a jazzy world to a more atonal one. The jazz harmony became associated with slow lyrical melodic gestures, while the more expressionistic ones generated angular, high-energy material. The form that emerged was a five·part structure with slow contemplative sections at the beginning, middle and end of the piece. This quartet was written for the New York Camerata. "Canyons" (1993) was inspired by a trip to Bryce Canyon National Park in the summer of 1990. Encountered almost by accident as a detour on the way to the Grand Canyon, its shapes and colors, although less dramatic and massive than those of its more famous counterpart, felt more idiosyncratic, sensual. and warm. To a New Yorker, awed by Nature's sculpting of space, the tall spires of the rocks make macabre references to the upward thrust of Manhattan's skyscrapers. The piece tries to put these Images together, to capture their shared beauty and power, and, at the same time, explore their differences, the canyon so fresh, open, and direct. the city full of human complexity and struggle. As a result parts of the piece are lyrical and atmospheric, whereas others are more stark and dissonant There are also sudden changes in texture and dynamics as if thoughts of one environment were Intruding on the experience of being in the other. "Ehre" (1988) was motivated solely by the excitement of the violin itself. The piece pays tribute to both to the dignity and lyricism of the violin's long history and the exuberant dazzling world whIch has been opened up by the technical abilities of twentieth century performers. The virtuosic textures which incorporate trills, fast double stops. scales, arpeggios. and glissandi are offset by long quiet lines and delicate high notes. While searching for a title for the piece. I overheard my daughter Katherine, who the age of one and a half, responded to questions she couldn't answer with the utterance "ehrehrehre..." I recalled the German word "ehre" which the dictionary translates as "honor, reputation, respect, rank, glory, praise, credit." These words are associated with the violin in this piece. Hemispheres (1989) is a two-part piece as its title suggests. Its form invokes well-known hemispheres such as the globe and the brain in which entities on a similar overall surface have distinct atmospheres or functions depending on which side of the dividing line they occupy. After an initial cello solo. the two Instruments embark on an odyssey through complex musical territory. They travel from the extreme ranges of their instruments at the beginning of the piece to the narrowest in a chorale towards the middle. They move between angular abstract textures and lyrical flowing ones. After the chorale they retrace their Journey In the second hemisphere, a rapid reexamination of the melodic and harmonic material of the entire first half of the piece characterized by staccatos, an in tense contrapuntal climax. and rolling piano arpeggios. The piece ends with a return to the chorale material. "Hemispheres" Is dedicated to my second daughter, Tamar.