I’m happy to announce that the paper score for my violin duo Through Closed Doors, notated on an antique door, is now available for purchase from my publisher Oxingale Music. The work was commissioned and premiered by Ilana Waniuk and Suhashini Arulanandam in the winter of 2014. The duo was inspired by an antique door which had been attacked by a teenager girl in a fit of passion, resulting in a jagged hole. I structured the piece around the door’s different panels, creating a kind of choreography for the two performers who move around the door as they play. The notation drew on medieval illuminated manuscripts and incorporates dynamics, accents and bow pressure right into the staff lines for a more intuitive performance. Since the door is rather large and expensive to transport (though it does have a travel case if anyone is interested in renting it), I also made a paper score, which is now available for purchase here.

The premiere of the work from a draft paper score drawn with pencil happened in February 2014, right during the most difficult days of the Maidan protests in Ukraine, which ousted the pro-russian president Yanukovych, a corrupt criminal who was trying to bring Ukraine back into russia’s sphere of influence. I watched livestreams of tires burning in the centre of Kyiv, the people fearlessly resisting a regime rapidly growing increasingly oppressive, as we rehearsed the work. I cannot think of this piece separately from these protests, especially now, knowing the chain of events that eventually forced Ukraine to defend itself yet again against russia’s imperialist aggression.