
Trio for Violin, Viola, and Piano
Each music composition has its own creation story, which sometimes can be rather mysterious and unique.
It was October 1988, when I visited the USA for the first time, still as a member of the delegation Soviet composers. We were staying primarily in Boston, where we gave concerts, scholarly presentations, and became acquainted with our American counterparts.
On one occasion, a colleague invited us to his home in the picturesque town of Rockport, situated on the ocean shore and surrounded by a thick woodland. After a hearty dinner, I decided to go for a little walk in the woods, and at some point, discovered that I had lost my way. This made the walk much longer than I had originally planned. All night I was randomly strolling in the woods, and only with the light of dawn, found myself on the beach, a few miles away from the town.
In the span of this unexpected adventure, I was listening and absorbing the frightening and enigmatic sounds of the night forest, which gradually began to transform into music in my head. By dawn, the main ideas of my future Trio had crystallized.
Upon my return to Kiev, I arranged these spontaneous nocturnal images and developed them into a full-scale composition. The sensation of the lost path, which was the initial impulse for this score, permeates the entire composition and echoes both with my personal state of mind back then and with my premonition of the forthcoming dramatic turn of history.
The Trio was premiered in February 1989 in Kiev, at Karaite Kenesa, one of the city's most beautiful and acoustically perfect venues. Originally the building served as a temple for the Karaimes, a small minority of Turkish descent, adhering to a unique branch of Judaism. During the performance of my Trio, I felt the sound being permeated with sacred vibrations of the ancient faith.
I never thought that one day I would once again visit Rockport. However, destiny has its own design. In 1996 I was invited to Cambridge, Massachusetts to give a lecture on contemporary Ukrainian music at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. An invisible thread brought me back to the Boston area again.
This visit caused a rapid chain reaction of unexpected and exciting turns: more lectures at Harvard and other universities in New England, a permanent position of Composer-in-Residence at the Harvard Film Archive, and finally, a professorship at the Composition Department of Berklee College of Music. A new, American chapter of my life started, and by yet another magical coincidence, Rockport became my home for several years.
Thus, the path once lost in the dark woods of Massachusetts, turned out to be the only right path, which led me to new, broader horizons.
Furthermore, in a few years my Trio was included in a CD collection of Berklee faculty composers. For this occasion, I revisited my score while living in Rockport. Thus, the last traces of the Trio materialized in the same exact location as its first.
The music language of my Trio is based on post-serial composition techniques, where the integral music space-and-time is organized by a rotating multitude of small thematic elements. One of these elements is a broken chromatic scale within the range of a minor third, which appears in the piano part in different registers and transpositions.
It is namely this motive with which the Trio ends. When I saw it in writing in the last bar of my score, I was astonished by its pitch composition, which unintentionally formed one of the most revered music monograms of all times: B - A - C - H.
I was certainly far from assuming that Bach's spirit had descended in order to bless my humble creative effort. Yet there is something truly mystical in this coincidence. Indeed, our lost paths may turn out to be the only true ones, those which lead us to the discovery of the supreme truth.


Rockport, Massachusetts

Kiev. Karaite Kenesa.


Performed by Nota Bene Chamber Group