Program Notes with Score Video 

I met Sarah Walder Amata at a music festival in Flagstaff, AZ in the late 1990’s, but soon afterward she moved to the Netherlands where she forged a very notable career in early music. I did not see her again until after I had retired from the Phoenix Symphony in 2018 when we both showed up for the initial rehearsal of the Arizona Philharmonic in Prescott, AZ. We have been gigging and chamber music partners ever since. One of her initiatives is an annual unaccompanied cello concert in which she performs a Bach suite, a new work, and her latest collection of original works.

Emergency Exit is the fourth work I have written for her and the third for her concert series. Each work has been quite different including one (Restless in Loops) I wrote for her and her loop station that was featured by the American Composers Alliance Shelter Music performances during the Covid pandemic. Unlike the others, Emergency Exit is more like an encore piece with its lively and energetic character.

The title occurred to me when I was about halfway through writing the piece. Unlike many composers, I tend to write my music from front to back (instead of piecemeal or in sections). In writing this piece, I was through the first 50-60 bars and concerned because what I planned to do was scoping out at about 8-9 minutes, which was nearly twice as long as I had hoped. It was at that point that I had the idea for the short pizzicato section in the middle. I saw it as “a way out” or an “emergency exit.”  At the time, which was the end of January 2025, many of us were looking for an emergency exit anyway, and so the title stuck. Emergency Exit is about four and a half minutes in length and was written at my home in Phoenix.