Program Notes

In 2008, my cousins Helen and Paul Carlson asked if they might commission me to write a piece in honor of their mother, my aunt Dorothy Leavens Carlson, MD, on the occasion of her 80th birthday.

I had already planned to write a piece for the Quartet for the End of Time ensemble (clarinet, violin, cello, and piano) for Pacific Serenades’ 2009 season; I love the remarkable palette of colors the ensemble provides, and I also wanted to make use of a sketch I had written in 2003, intended for a piece for bass clarinet and piano for Jeff Anderle’s UCLA senior recital. Alas, I was unable to write the piece in time, and so my sketches for it languished—until this opportunity arose.

As I wrote this piece, my aunt was in the midst of decline from Alzheimer’s. Though I never set out to write a piece about this awful disease, her decline colored my entire composing process. And though the movement titles—Ostinato (a repeating figure in music, but also stubborn in Italian), The Fog, Lost, Faria Beach—came in every case after I had written the music, they perhaps relate to experiences of dementia, too. On the other hand, an ensemble from San Francisco who performed View from a Hilltop a few years later interpreted the titles to relate to scenes of the California coastline, and it makes me happy that people have responded in different ways.

View from a Hilltop was commissioned by my cousins, but also by their cousins, aunts, and uncles, owners of Leavens Ranches in Ventura County, where my aunt grew up. It was an honor to write this piece, especially as she and my uncle Gordon were huge supporters of my work and of me throughout my entire life.

The title popped into my head when I imagined the vantage point of one who has lived a long, interesting, and fruitful life—not quite at the godlike height of a mountaintop, but a hill, from which one can see scenes of life going on below: the stubborn and repetitive aggression of some in our world; a fog from which one yearns to escape; the sadness of disorientation and loss; the peace of a beautiful place like Faria Beach, where the Leavens family has spent many happy years.

View from a Hilltop was premiered by Jonathan Sacdalan, clarinet, Roger Wilkie, violin, David Speltz, cello, and Joanne Pearce Martin, piano, on Pacific Serenades concerts in March of 2009.

—Mark Carlson