JOHN LIBERATORE
composer

Written for violinist Patrick Yim, "Between Light and Shade" draws inspiration from Lu Hsun's "Wild Grass."  Patrick introduced me to this marvelous collection of aphoristic stories as a way of pairing my piece with other pieces in his repertoire.  Reading the collection, I was particularly taken by the story,  "The Shadow's Leave-Taking," in which the shadow (your shadow) says: "I shall leave you and sink into darkness.  Yet darkness will swallow me up, and light also will cause me to vanish."  I hesitate to assign a specific, programmatic relationship between my piece and this short story.  Doing so seems antithetical to the text, with its layers of ambiguity and meaning.  It would dispel the shadow, so to speak.  Instead, I will say that the music and the text "fit" together in my imagination, in that mysterious way in which music interacts with the written word.