BARBARA MONK FELDMAN (b.1953): The Northern Shore for Violin, Piano and Percussion (Marc Sabat [violin], Stephen Clarke [piano], Dirk Rothbrust [percussion], In the Small Time of a Desert Flower for Piano (Aki Takahashi).

Description: These works were inspired by nature, and both are gently meditative explorations of sustained tone and gently luminous timbre. Less concerned with the acoustic structure of sounds and their exhaustively detailed examination than similarly slow, extended works by her late husband Morton (although unsurprisingly they share some æsthetic ideals) these pieces employ their precisely selected tone colors in widely spaced single notes and sonorous intervals as a metaphor for the shifting light, luminous shadows, changes of perspective and the relationship of object to background observed in the natural world, and the similarly unstable perspective of time when experienced as a component of nature. The Northern Shore presents a distant view of the confluence of land, water, sky and light in constant motion but just too slowly to be perceived as movement, and the Flower is fragile, transient and yet part of a landscape outside time.