everything is lurking in places we least expect for guitar, shamisen, violin and cello

(2025)

everything is lurking in places we least expect is a 14-minute mini-concerto of sorts for shamisen and very small ensemble, although the parts for the violin, cello and guitar are by no means any less virtuosic than the shamisen part! It was commissioned by shamisen master Hidejiro Honjoh.

Hidejiro asked me to compose this piece for him and his ensemble over a year and a half before it was to be premiered. I was extremely excited and overly confident that I would have enough time to work on the piece over those many months, little by little. However, my life became complicated; it always becomes complicated. But this time it really was unusually and unexpectedly so. Rather than work on the piece regularly, my attention to the piece happened in periods of intense, short, concentrated bursts.

Since I had never written for shamisen before, and I am deeply moved by its fusion of instrumental and vocal traditions, it was important to me that the human voice become an important part of the piece. The timbral flexibility of the instrument is astounding, and for someone who has worked almost exclusively with Western European instruments, the privilege to begin to explore this new instrument was extremely thrilling.

Over the last few years, I have experimented with altering the tuning of strings, and this piece is no exception. The violin, cello, and guitar are all tuned in an atypical manner, with the cello having a low B string (not low C string), the violin having a low F# string (not low G string), and the guitar being tuned to harmonics from the B and F# series on the two “lowest” strings (3 guitar strings to harmonics from the low B-string series, and 3 guitar strings tuned to harmonics from the low F#-string series). The shamisen uses a traditional B-E-B tuning. The work is dedicated to Hidejiro.

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