In the past my music has tended to gravitate towards rich polyphonic textures. Monophonic music, on the other hand, seems more complex and demanding to me because only one musical instrument is involved. With that being said, the challenges for me when composing a monophonic piece lie in creating interesting music that is also playable.
Such was the case when I began writing the Specter for cello in late 2011. Granted, this piece was not my first venture into composing monophonic music. The previous year, I had written a short piece for B-Flat clarinet. With Specter, my initial goal was to create a set of two concert etudes: one which focused on bowing techniques and the other on pizzicato. After the second piece did not come to fruition, I decided to make a short cello piece that retained the technical qualities of a concert etude, yet utilized modern sounds.
Specter is an atonal piece that depicts a ghost wandering the earth. Although I did not utilize Twelve-Tone compositional techniques for this work, it is ironic that I drew inspiration from the music of Austrian Serial composer, Ernst Krenek (1900-1991): specifically, the first movement of his Suite, Op. 84 for cello. Of course, I was focusing primarily on the overall timbre of the piece and wanted to use similar sounds with Specter. I feel that the dark musical texture of the cello in my work, coupled with an abundance of rests and shifts in meter, serve to create an appropriately eerie atmosphere.