violin and piano
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Chamber Music
violin and piano
5 movements
violin, cello, and piano
Instrumentation: cello and piano
Duration: 3 minutes
Composed: 2007
Instrumentation: violin and piano
Duration: 15 minutes
Composed: 2012
Premiere: September 9, 2012 by Hrabba Attladottir (violin) and Gregg Kallor (piano); Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Half Moon Bay, CA
My maternal grandmother was a talented violinist, but she stopped playing after her mother died. By the time I was alive, her arthritis prevented her from holding the violin. Her parents bought her a baby grand piano for her sixteenth birthday so that she and her sister, a cellist, could invite friends over to play chamber music. That was the instrument on which I learned to play.
I grew up six blocks from my grandparents and saw them most days of the week. We were very close. They came to every concert I gave and always sat right in front (arriving super early to ensure snagging that prime real estate). They never got to hear this music, but I feel their presence very strongly when I play it.
I wrote Short Stories imagining my grandmother playing it, and my grandfather listening to it. She was a gentle, quiet soul and he was the strongest man I've ever known. Both had a touch of mischief. They were deeply in love for nearly 63 years.
Short Stories:
Faces and Names
A Kept Promise
Sticks and Stones
5 movements
Instrumentation: 4 violins, 2 violas, and 2 cellos
Duration: 12 minutes
Composed: 2019
Commissioned by: Tuesday Musical
Premiere: October 30, 2019 by the Dover String Quartet and the Escher String Quartet at E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall at the University of Akron, Ohio
I’ve been thinking recently about the joining of two entities into a single union. As I write this, I’m excitedly awaiting my wedding. I’m in love with my fiancée’s individuality, her deep breadth of experience, her wisdom and thoughtfulness and talent and grace, which she brings to everything she does and everyone around her. She is one of the great wonders of my world. Sharing our individual perspectives with each new experience has made my life so much richer.
As in the most rewarding relationships, the individual voices of a chamber music ensemble don’t get lost - they interact with each other; they stimulate and enhance each other; they blend, and coalesce into a single expressive force. The gentle and respectful joining of the individual voices has the potential to create something truly magical.
This composition for string octet isn’t a programmatic piece - meaning that it doesn’t convey a specific narrative. Rather, I wanted to explore, musically, the merging of the two phenomenal ensembles who will premiere this piece at Tuesday Musical in October: the Dover Quartet and the Escher Quartet! It’s especially fitting that these extraordinary groups are joining forces for this piece, since violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt (Dover) and cellist Brook Speltz (Escher) are married.
As she does with so many things, my fiancée has opened my eyes to the beauty of a fascinating creature: the octopus. After reading (mostly aloud to me) the book, “The Soul of an Octopus,” we visited a Giant Pacific Octopus at the Seattle Aquarium and watched it sprint through the water, extend and furl its eight arms (which have suckers along most of their length, as opposed to tentacles, which have suckers only on the tips), and interact with a diver when it was snack time. Its every arm operates independently, lined with hundreds of suckers through which it tastes the food it rolls up to its beak. (Yeah, octopuses have beaks. Crazy.) A fully grown Giant Pacific Octopus can compress its ninety-pound body to squeeze through a hole the size of a lemon. (!) They can change color to express mood, comfort level and intentions; they can also change texture to mimic their surroundings. Graceful and intelligent; playful; sensitive; and adaptable.
A string octet is the octopus of chamber music: eight musicians breathing and playing together as a single entity, sublimating individual experience into combined expressive purpose. That’s what I wanted to explore in this composition for octet. I hope it resonates.
I dedicate this string octet to the two people whose union has been the foundation and source of all of my happiness: my parents. Loving, thoughtful, respectful, warm, and wise, my parents are the best of people. No music can encapsulate or convey the joy and beauty that they bring to me and to this world; but music seems a fitting way to, in some small way, express my love and respect and admiration for them as individuals and as a couple; as parents and as citizens. I’m grateful to them for so much - for everything, really. My parents approach their fiftieth wedding anniversary as I begin my own marriage. Two individuals, one union. Two ensembles, one composition. Together. Complete.
© Gregg Kallor, August 2019
Instrumentation: cello and piano
Duration: 15 minutes
Composed: 2013
Premiere: September 26, 2013 by Laura Metcalf (cello) and Gregg Kallor (piano) at SubCulture NYC
with cellist Joshua Roman at SubCulture NY
Sometimes there's a disconnect between the things we feel and the things we say; Undercurrent explores where the two meet. The simmering line that the cello and piano pass back and forth is always churning away just under the surface, like the fraught subtext that sometimes attends our most intimate conversations — until it bubbles up and explodes. (Some relationships are, um... dynamic.) The middle movement evokes that fragile place of unspoken intimacy — where a glance, a gesture, a touch can mean everything.