Pynes (2016)
for flute and piano
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John McMurtery, flute
Ashlee Mack, piano
Ashlee Mack, piano
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PROGRAM NOTE
Pynes, for flute and piano, was written in 2016 for John McMurtery and Ashlee Mack. The work may also be performed with clarinet substituting for flute and/or vibraphone substituting for piano. Over the course of the composition’s nine minutes a single four-note pitch-set, shared by both instruments, is gradually replaced by a different set of four notes: as each new pitch is added, one of the original four is removed as the music slowly transforms from one tetrachord to the other. The work is structurally informed by a modified all-partition array originally created by Milton Babbitt, and its title is inspired by Vynes, a flute/piano work by Robert Morris that employs similar Babbittonian array principles in its construction. The spelling of both Pynes and Vynes is yet another tribute to Babbitt, who used the term lyne to identify horizontal strings of pitches within his arrays.