The passing of grackles (2025)
alto flute
c. 5 minutes
Composed for and dedicated to Carol Shansky
Premiered by Carol Shansky (guitar)
Allendale, NJ, 3 May 2026 (forthcoming)
For poet Amy Lowell, grackles were a way to tell time. The narrator of her poem “Purple Grackles,” published in the posthumous collection What’s O’Clock (1925), dreaded the arrival of grackles in her garden at the end of every summer. What begins as a seeming distaste for the noise created by the plague of grackles (the Audubon Bird Guide, after all, compares the grackle’s screech to a rusty hinge!) gradually reveals the narrator’s true concern: that the grackles signify the end of summer. Lowell’s poem thus reflects a longing for summer to last just a little longer before the seasons change—even if her narrator must beg the mischievous grackles to stay. [Read Lowell's poem here!]
I composed The passing of grackles (2025) for Carol Shansky during one of these transitional periods between summer and autumn. The solo piece traces the narrator’s observations of the grackles as she looks out at her garden from her kitchen window. We experience the stillness of the garden, the building chaos of the grackles, the coming of the autumn winds, the departure of the grackles, and, finally, the emptiness of the abandoned summer garden that makes way for the arrival of the fall.
c. 5 minutes
Composed for and dedicated to Carol Shansky
Premiered by Carol Shansky (guitar)
Allendale, NJ, 3 May 2026 (forthcoming)
For poet Amy Lowell, grackles were a way to tell time. The narrator of her poem “Purple Grackles,” published in the posthumous collection What’s O’Clock (1925), dreaded the arrival of grackles in her garden at the end of every summer. What begins as a seeming distaste for the noise created by the plague of grackles (the Audubon Bird Guide, after all, compares the grackle’s screech to a rusty hinge!) gradually reveals the narrator’s true concern: that the grackles signify the end of summer. Lowell’s poem thus reflects a longing for summer to last just a little longer before the seasons change—even if her narrator must beg the mischievous grackles to stay. [Read Lowell's poem here!]
I composed The passing of grackles (2025) for Carol Shansky during one of these transitional periods between summer and autumn. The solo piece traces the narrator’s observations of the grackles as she looks out at her garden from her kitchen window. We experience the stillness of the garden, the building chaos of the grackles, the coming of the autumn winds, the departure of the grackles, and, finally, the emptiness of the abandoned summer garden that makes way for the arrival of the fall.