Butterflies and Dragons

Program Notes

Butterflies and Dragons was composed for the 2011 Melos Music Festival in San Francisco, CA. Throughout the piece, I was interested in exploring textures and colors that would sparkle and shimmer, while always maintaining a kinetic dialogue between the instruments. Writing about the premiere (in which I played the percussion part), Bay-Area critic Adam Broner remarked:

Composer and percussionist Daniel Temkin chose bursts of energy in his sextet. Here, each instrument is treated almost as a form of percussion: short motifs come off the strings as an explosive force, then refer back to Temkin’s own playing on an array of percussion…[The work] though exuberant, contains a thoughtful core, perhaps the butterfly within the dragon.

— Daniel Temkin