string trio; duration ca. 15′

      When I was asked to write a piece by the Entraide Française, I mused about this presence of French culture on the Upper East Side, which brought to mind one of my favorite places in New York: the Met’s collection of French decorative arts. I certainly love an 18th-century period room, so I planned this series of miniatures inspired by the galleries at the Met.

      For the most part, the music is inspired simply by the visual language of these rooms – their lavish layouts, warm lighting, and gilt ornamentation. But the piece also takes a step back, musing on the strangeness of peering into someone’s drawing room from within a museum. I began to think about the false sense of interiority – all the windows, of course, have only walls behind them – and the “museumification of domesticity,” so to speak.

      It’s worth pointing out that my intention was not to depict these rooms in a literal way – structurally, culturally, or historically. Perhaps the charming lightness of Couperin or Ravel was in the back of my mind, but this is certainly not a piece intending to sound meaningfully “French.” Rather, the music is based on my own collected impressions, with the rooms’ sense of domestic comfort filtered through a lens of 21st century Americana.