Three Pieces by Kate Whitley
for violin and piano

My three violin and piano pieces were commissioned as a set by violinist Beatrice Philips. I first played with Beatrice last Easter at Prussia Cove, where we played Janáček's Violin Sonata together, and I wanted to write something for her which echoed the tense and fragmentary nature of the Janáček. This is what brought me to the idea of writing a string of three character pieces, with every movement self-contained and isolated from each other.

My initial draft of the first piece was less than a minute long; with the opening muffled bars (where the pianist has to dampen the piano strings by hand to match the pizzicato sound of the violin) leading to an explosive middle section, and then dissipating almost instantly.

Stuck with where to proceed from this short but complete, self-contained structure, I eventually decided to simply repeat the music in full from the beginning. This feature, of the music "happening twice", became the focus for the work and recurs in the other pieces in the set.

The second is a sad song in three verses, which is broken at the climax by a disjunct coda of repeated hit chords. These chords lead straight into into the third movement—of fast scrubbing tremolos—where the violin and piano vie against each other's lines and collide only in the final few bars.