New Music USA Online Library

Cloud Shadows for Violin and Piano

Lawrence Kramer

Cloud shadows are best seen from the air.  Travelers on the window seats of planes
can often descend from a visual blank slate above the cloud cover to observe clouds
drifting and casting their shadows over the landscape, revealing their shapes and
producing a perfect mirror effect wedding light to darkness at a distance.  The same
phenomenon is occasionally visible from high ground--I'm thinking particularly of
a hill with a panoramic view of the countryside a few miles frommy home in New
York’s Hudson Valley--when the clouds find the right shapes and the sun the right
position and above and below once again mirror each other.  The music of "Cloud Shadows" gradually evolves toward such a moment, with its rich array of metaphoricalsuggestions, over the course of about ten minutes.

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