Lianas

for violin, ‘cello, and piano

Thomas Feng
Program Notes

While this piece isn’t explicitly programmatic, I like to think of it as a short exploration of “organic musical
growth”: following a musical thought, writing more spontaneously than calculatedly, and letting the piece take
me where it wants to go. The image I had in mind while writing was that of a vine sprouting in fertile soil and
climbing upward, spiraling in knotted curls and ramifications; wildly sprawling laterally and always moving
skyward, but never losing its tether around the tree to which it is tightly coiled.

Performance Notes
General
- Dotted barlines precede measures in which rhythm is more or less free, or "unmeasured". (A solid
barline denotes a return to tempo)
- Hairpins with circles at their ends denote crescendoes or diminuendoes that start from or end with
nothing. (i.e. crescendo dal niente or diminuendo al niente)

Strings
- S.P. = sul ponticello
- S.T. = sul tasto
- N = normal position

Piano
- Division of notes between hands is always at the discretion of the performer; indications in the score
are merely suggestions.
- The notes F1, G1, and Ab1 (the lowest F, G, and Ab on the keyboard) are to be marked with chalk
or masking tape at their strings’ respective 5th partial nodes before performance, as they are used for
harmonics in the piece and must be able to be quickly located.
o Also, (as George Crumb has noted!) piano harmonics are particularly resonant when the left
hand leaves the string immediately after the note is sounded.