No Half Measures

Program Notes

No Half Measures came about at the crossroads of several things: at first, it was a sort of “leading piece,” a way for me to cut my teeth on dedicated soloistic writing for the viola before I dove into Plein Air, my viola concerto. During its undertaking, it also became a classic “pandemic piece,” something to keep my brain afloat when it felt like everything suddenly got pulled out from underneath Susan and I. Most importantly, though, this sonata is in memory of Linda Shaver-Gleason, who passed in 2020 directly before the pandemic, after a protracted battle with cancer—or, as she put it, after she was “assassinated by cancer.” She was only thirty-six years old. A violist herself and a brilliant and energizing musicologist, what stays with me the most about Linda was how open she was about her entire experience with cancer: not platitudes, not carefully-airbrushed narratives, but the very real ups and downs of her everyday life, which she shared candidly online. (The “Hyphen” of the first movement came from her handle online, playing on her multiple last names.) She still took pleasure in the things she could, big and small; she still wanted to do research, because she loved it and it fed her intellectually; she still got annoyed by small things, miffed at traffic, frustrated with dim people saying dim things. She resisted the narrative of being a kind of blank martyr in her illness because she was a real, genuine person with real, genuine struggles—a kind of openness and realness that affected me deeply. This piece is, in its own small way, a shrine to that openness, an appreciation for the finite everyday moments we’re given, both the joyful ones and the thorny ones.