Faye-Ellen Silverman

Reaching the End of the Dance

Year: 2022

Duration (in minutes): 5

Difficulty: High (professional)

Category: solo string instrument

Instruments: cello

Publisher: Subito Music Corp.

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

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

Description: The title of my composition refers to Dlugoszewski’s Disparate Stairway Radical Other – the theme of the Composers Concordance concert presenting the world premiere. Dlugoszewski’s composed Radical Other in 1995 - in the later part of her life and shortly after she lost her longtime partner, Erick Hawkins. My title plays on many interpretations of “dance”. I was especially influenced by the words of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Time” and the Josephine Baker quote “I shall dance all my life…I would like to die breathless, spent, at the end of a dance.” Reaching the End of the Dance starts with an invitation to the dance. My “dance” doesn’t use conventional dance rhythms – a tribute to Dlugoszewski’s music for dance. After this solo cello work reaches its fastest tempo, it begins to slow down, inserting references to a traditional waltz, until it slows to the original tempo and dies out. The pizzicatos on a single pitch - which serve as an invitation to the dance - appear in other parts of this short work. The opening motif of C-D-Eb appears several times, sometimes expanded (eg D-F-G), and sometimes transposed. My works often have this kind of motivic interconnection. Here, however, its use relates to the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of “radical” as “of or growing from the root of a plant”. This definition was the starting point of this work.