title: Willingly
instrumentation: flute, piano, electronics
duration: 8 minutes
written in: 2012-13
text: composite (see below)
Willingly is one of the most spare, spacious pieces I’ve written in a long time. It’s based on the recorded voices of friends, colleagues, former students and family members talking about unanticipated changes in their lives — some of them trivial and some of them very significant.
When Lily Floeter and David Chavannes asked me to write a piece for them, they requested that it respond in some way to Copland’s Duo, which they played on the same concert. The connection with Copland is indirect, but if you look for it, you can hear echoes of both his musical language and his personal circumstances.
Thanks to David Berman, Richard Boersig, Eliza Brown, Ethan Brown, David Chavannes, Bex Finken-Hernández, Julie Drallos, Arlene Dunn, Larry Dunn, Nancy Temple, Katherine Young, and many others for lending me their voices and their stories.
See the score
List of sound sources
Listen
Lily Floeter, flute
David Chavannes, piano
Studio recording, 5.26.13
Recorded by Alex Inglizian
This recording of Willingly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs license. This means that you can freely share the recording, as long as you don’t use it commercially, and credit Alex Temple as the composer and Lily Floeter and David Chavannes as the performers.
Watch
[same personnel as above]
Safety Second:
Alex Letourneau, flute
Nick Martinez, piano
Recorded for the Fresh Inc Festival Showcase Performance, 6.17.20