Apart from pianists and violinists, cellists are among the few instrumentalists who regularly give unaccompanied recital performances. To me, this has always seemed a kind of heroic musical act. In accompanied performances, the brief moments in which the piano plays alone give the soloist moments to breathe, to stretch their hands, to refocus their attention. Without these interludes, the difficulty of sustained concentration compounds, relieved only by the breaks between compositions during which the performer often leaves the stage before returning—with a new round of applause—to begin the next work. The longer a piece proceeds uninterrupted, the more difficult it becomes. The unaccompanied solo recital is a kind of high-wire act with no parallel in the musical performance tradition.

Nineteen Movements for Unaccompanied Cello (2018) pushes—sometimes gently, sometimes more forcefully—on the boundaries of this convention. At nearly one hour in performance, its length exceeds that of most works in the standard cello repertoire. The music is occasionally fast, aggressive, and reckless. More often, though, it is quiet and contemplative. This music requires the performer to call upon a different kind of virtuosity: one of endurance, focus, vulnerability, and stillness.

Each movement is a reflection on one of four “images” related to the themes of solitude and wilderness: walking, singing, wind, and waves. Several of the movements focus intensely on a single musical idea, while others fixate on a texture, a feeling, or a sensibility. Most of the movements correspond to a “twin” later in the piece, another passage that approaches the same musical material from a different direction.

The changes are usually made near the musical surface rather than at deeper structural levels: plucked passages become bowed, loud passages are played again at the edge of silence, and harmonic outlines undergo rhythmic transformation. It is my hope that, with repeated hearings, the second half of the piece might be experienced as a softly vanishing memory of the first.

Arlen Hlusko commissioned the work in 2017 while she and I were both affiliated with the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. There, we worked together closely for more than a year, experimenting with draft material, making revisions through collaborative working sessions, and testing the large- scale form of the final work. The composition and, I believe, Arlen’s interpretation of it, both reflect this collaborative approach to creation and are the result of a sustained period of experimentation, experience, and evolution.

Arlen presented the world premiere in February 2018 at the Chestnut Hill Skyspace, an art installation by James Turrell which is housed in a Quaker meetinghouse in Philadelphia. We chose the location for its pristine acoustic conditions, but also because the inward-facing rectangular seating plan of the meetinghouse ensured that the audience members would form a tightly-knit geometric enclosure around the soloist. Focused inward in this way, they were able to share in her experience as she performed this delicate, virtuosic music without pause or accompaniment for nearly an hour.

Several movements draw inspiration from the substantial repertoire of music that exists for solo cello, particularly works by Bach and Benjamin Britten. In others, I move away from this tradition toward my personal version of musical minimalism, a language of spareness, simplicity, and restraint. In all, I have sought to create a large-scale work which balances architectural clarity with with immediacy, tenderness, and warmth.