Aspetuck Waters (1999/2002) Oksana Ezhokina, piano; Naho Tsutsui, violin; Aaron Packard, violin; Johanna Beaver, viola; Katie Schlaikjer, cello; Jenny LaBonté, contrabass (chamber version recorded at the Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook, NY, 2002)

Program notes "Aspetuck Waters", originally scored for piano, string orchestra, and percussion, was written for the Easton Public Library in Easton, Connecticut in celebration of the acquisition of its new piano. The first incarnation of this piece was as the middle movement of a piece for youth orchestra--with no piano--named "Three Excursions". The youth orchestra had asked me to write three movements based (loosely) on non-Western musical traditions, and this one, built on a pentatonic scale, was called East Asian. Later I made an alternate version for chamber sextet: piano, 2 violins, viola, cello, and contrabass.

The name "Aspetuck" comes from the Aspetuck River, which runs close to where I grew up in Easton, Connecticut. I wrote "Aspetuck Waters" in support of the movement in Easton to protect the Trout Brook Valley, also nearby, which ecologically is a key link in the largest remaining unbroken forest in southern Connecticut. Trout Brook Valley (which is close to the Saugatuck Reservoir) was owned for many years by the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company, which had always used its land as a buffer zone to create a natural filtration system for the Saugatuck Reservoir. Although privately owned, the forest was intact and untouched. (Southern Connecticut geography lesson: the Aspetuck River flows out of the Easton Reservoir, which is fed by the Saugatuck Reservoir.)

This became a critical issue in the late 1990s when the Hydraulic Company, forced by new state regulations to put in a very expensive (and uneccesary) new filtration system, decided it needed to sell parts of the now-unneeded buffer-zone land in order to be able to pay for the new system. When Trout Brook Valley was put on the market, it was immediately threatened by high-bidding developers who had plans for large-scale, unsustainable residential development—-including the requisite golfcourse. Through the hard work of the Aspetuck Land Trust and many others, the Aspetuck Land Trust now owns and is environmentally responsible for Trout Brook Valley, thanks to funding from the Nature Conservancy, the State of Connecticut, and thousands of private contributions.