Category: Chamber

Do I Wake or Sleep? Triosatz for Flute, Violin, and Bass clarinet (2023)

Commissioned by the Walden School 2023 Young Musicians Program Faculty Commissioning Project, this trio was written for and premiered by TAK ensemble. The piece is conceived as an ethereal exploration of liminality, portraying, as the title (a quote from Keats) suggests, an in-between state of consciousness. The piece is a simple ternary form: A fast, alternatively delicate and aggressive section gives way to a slower lyrical tune written for violin, sul G. After the winds take up the melody, the flutist is asked to improvise a cadenza, and following this, there is brief recapitulation of the opening fast material before the piece seems to evaporate into nothing.

Kalcheim-Do-I-Wake-or-Sleep-Score-in-C

On Poetry and the Earth: Two Poems for Actor and String Trio (2022)

I wrote this piece for the Elsewhere Ensemble, a group that combines theater and classical music in new, engaging ways. The ensemble’s core group consists of a trio of fantastic string players alongside Broadway veteran actor MacIntyre Dixon.

When, I all too recently discovered Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen’s ode To John Keats, Poet, at Springtime, I felt drawn into conversation with someone who understood me. Like Cullen, I have long been enamored (or obsessed perhaps) with Keats’ poems and fascinated by the myths surrounding his tragically short life. Cullen’s poem is a series of delicately versified reflections on the beauty of a spring day; in it, he reaches out to Keats as a kindred spirit, one who like him could sense the beauty of nature keenly, even to the point of its driving him into a kind of ecstasy. Setting this poem in a musical piece where it could be spoken rather than sung seemed to me a way of elevating a masterpiece–giving it a richly wrought frame, as it were, one that, like Cullen’s work, embodies many traditional aspects of form and rhetoric, but also stylistically reflects the early 20th century. In accompanying this poem with one of Keats’ own, I mean to present Cullen as I hope he would have wanted himself presented—as a successor to Keats’ poetic tradition. Keats’ sonnet On the Grasshopper and Cricket, also shares themes with Cullen’s poem, and, I hope, creates a vital dialogue with it about the relationship between the beauty we create in art, and the beauty of the earth, these being all part of the same thing.

On-Poetry-and-the-Earth-Kalcheim-Score

Grand Duo for alto saxophone and piano (2019)

I started writing this piece in Paris–something of an homage to the french origin of the saxophone, blending French Romantic and Impressionistic influences, with a hint of fin de siècle Russian music. Like most of my music, the strives to balance formal rigor with broad, lyrical melodies.

Grand-Duo-edits2-Full-Score-1

Fantasy Concerto for Marimba and Chamber Ensemble (2017)

This piece is an experiment: can the Classical concerto idiom be realized by a marimba? The instrumentation is likewise eccentric, with alto saxophone and bass clarinet in place of standard Classical winds, and a mixed ensemble of mostly winds instead of a string-predominant orchestra. The novelty of the marimba timbre did inspire a few oddities – for example, the piece modulates to the bVII key area in the exposition – but the overall structure and orchestration employed the paradigms of Mozart’s piano concertos. Though very different, the featured instruments contain a few important similarities. Like the marimba, the piano’s tone is percussive and clear, and both can execute similar runs and arpeggios. Mozart’s Concerto-sonata form guided the structure of the piece, and the piano in the Fantasy Concerto takes the functional place of the string section.

Fantasy Concerto for Marimba

Abendmusik for clarinet, cello, and piano (2017)

“Abendmusik” means “evening-music” and can refer both to evening church concerts and to courting serenades sung outside the beloved’s window.  This piece uses the clarinet dark, round timbre to evoke the hushed intensity of evening. Delicately winding melodies woo the listener with their Mozartean charm.

Abendmusik

String Quartet no. 3 (2017)

I. Adagio-Allegro appassionato
II. Menuetto (Allegro Moderato)-Trio
III.  Adagio
IV. Allegro molto

My third string quartet is long, passionate, and complex in structure, composed in the tradition of Beethoven’s late quartets. The first movement bends and stretches classical sonata form into something freer and more various, but still motivically unified. It begins in the “wrong” key, avoids a convincing cadence until the end of the exposition, and foreshadows one of the secondary theme in the introduction so that first becomes second, and second, first.

The second movement is a minuet and trio. The minuet, with its pizzicatos and syncopations, has a subdued melancholy echoing Brahms, while the rough-mannered, cheerful trio, with its use of drones, recalls Haydn’s “folk music” affect.

The Adagio movement is a free hybrid of sonata-rondo and theme and variation forms. The main theme is clear variation of the tender, slow theme that began the first movement, while the fugato that follows is based on the austere transition to the Allegro.

The finale is a sprightly, puckish Rondo in G minor.

String Quartet no 3 in G minor

Sonata for Violin and Piano in E minor, op. 10 (2015)

I. Andante lamentoso–Allegro
II. Andante
III. Allegretto

This piece was commissioned by fellow Frost School of Music student David Parks. When I asked what sort of piece he wanted me to write, David mentioned two things: that he loved the opening of Mozart’s dissonance quartet (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08uY0-ehL-w) (No. 19 in C Major, K. 465), and that surprisingly for a string player, he had a special liking for the key of D-flat major.  While D-flat major is a particularly difficult key for strings, it has a special, almost muted sound, which I employed in the Andante movement.

Mozart’s dissonance quartet inspired the opening of the first movement: dark and richly chromatic. Like the Mozart opening, the introduction briefly emphasizes “wrong” notes and slips quickly into distant keys before arriving at the main Allegro in E major. The main theme of the following Allegro section comprises three motives: a short fanfare-like motto, and a drawn-out, song-like melody (a la Don Giovanni courting(link)), and an elegant, weightless conclusion. Everything else in the movement stems from these three motives. The second movement begins and ends with a long-breathed, arching melody. Passed back and forth between the piano and violin, it slowly unfurls over an accompanying clock-like staccato figure. The piece concludes with a dark, melancholic rondo in E minor, with a main theme that seems both to dance and sigh. The final bars bring the sonata to a fiery, passionate close.

Sonata for Violin and Piano in E minor

Il Malincolico, for Oboe, Horn, and String Trio (2015)

The title of this piece means “the melancholic one.” This feeling of pensive sadness mixed with longing is evoked by two contrasting musical ideas: the passionate rushing figure which begins the piece and the drawn out song melody first heard in the horn. Below the horn melody, the strings maintain a bustling texture, highlighting the emotional intensity of the melody.

Il Malincolico for Oboe, Horn and String Trio