Wanderlust (viola and 2 percussion) - Programme Notes
                        (1998; 13')

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            Wanderlust was composed in the spring of 1998 for Rivka Golani, Bill Brennan, and Rob Power, who premiered it at the Newfoundland Sound Symposium that year. It was commissioned by the CBC (Two New Hours). The title, which I came up with only after completing the work, was chosen because the near-constant movement, never resting anywhere for long, conveyed for me a sense of restlessness, or wanderlust. The only significant departures from this occur in two sections about two-thirds of the way through. In the first, which I would describe as nervous, intense, and hesitant, the steady sixteenth-note motion finally breaks down, and leaves us with static, rhythmically fragmented material with pointillistic allusions to earlier ideas. The next is a much calmer, more rhythmically regular section in which the viola plays a lugubrious, haunting theme, and this in turn leads to a return of the steadily moving character of the opening, which concludes the work.

©Clark Winslow Ross