piano with string orchestra and percussion

or piano and string quintet (2 violins, viola, cello, and contrabass)

Duration: ca. 8’31”
Composed: 1999, revised 2002

Aspetuck Waters was commissioned by The Friends of the Easton Public Library and the Easton Arts Council (Easton, CT) to celebrate the purchase of a new grand piano for their concert space. 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, who had always used their 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.) It is now protected land

Aspetuck Waters was premiered at the Easton Public Library in June 1998 by The Bridgeport Youth Orchestra (Robert Genualdi, conductor) and pianist Vladimir Valjarevic. In 2002 I rescored it for piano and string quintet (2 violins, viola, cello, and contrabass). This version was first performed by Oksana Ezhokina, piano; Naho Tsutsui and Aaron Packard, violins; Johanna Beaver, viola; Katie Schlaikjer, cello; Jenny LaBonté, contrabass at a concert of my works at the Staller Center for the Arts at Stony Brook University, on May 5, 2002.