Today is Ed’s birthday.

And like every year since our first together, I will present him with a viola/piano duet I composed. They are all called Evocations.

This year it’s Evocation XXVIII.

Ed will probably blanche at the double stops, but I will assure him they are all played with one open string, so no awkward fingering required. (Never mind that one triple stop in measure 20, the one tricky exception to this rule …)

Ed might also at first hesitate at the many crunchy close major and minor second harmonies he must play. The viola melody is closely making its way around and about drone tones which shift from string to string as the piece progresses and digresses. But only at the very end is the lowest string, the C string, played openly.

Below is audio of Evocation XXVIII as played by the computer. All the notes can be heard, and the quality is pretty good, considering it is computer tones… but as always with the computer, that human touch is lacking.

And I have a hunch this Evocation, more willful and mysterious than its recent predecessors, especially requires that human touch …

Listen to the computer instruments’ straight-laced intoning here:

Below you can follow along with the score (which, I just noticed, somehow lost the measure lines on the far right sides when reformatted as a pdf – computer being bizarre…)