Faye-Ellen Silverman

Embracing the Woman in Red

Year: 2023

Duration (in minutes): 5'

Difficulty: Medium (college/community)

Category: piano

Instruments: piano

Publisher: Subito Music Corp.

Publisher website: https://www.subitomusic.com/

Purchase score URL: https://www.subitomusic.com/shop/

Description: Embracing the Woman in Red is a short work in two movements – Loving Embrace, and Shared Thoughts. The work originated at the request of Gene Pritsker for a Composer Concordance concert. For this project, a poet and a composer were paired and together chose a painting by Mark Kostabi from his permanent collection. The work that Erik T. Winter and I chose was a picture of a white figure and a red figure, sitting cheek-to-cheek, encircled in each other’s arms. In the first movement, I represented the idea of an embrace by having the piano’s right and left hands cross each other. In the second movement, the right and the left-hand share ideas. Sometimes an idea begins in one hand and finishes in the other. The two parts are often in counterpoint, but on occasion they unite as parallel octaves. The work ends with a reinterpretation of the opening chords – this time without the need to create a visual embrace by crossing the hands.