DESCRIPTION:
I. Iris (Starts at 1:00)
II. Freya's Tears (Starts at 6:19)
III. Sekhmet (Starts at 13:20)

Laura Barton, (Violin), and Michelle Velvin (Harp)

Robert Paterson is an American composer from Buffalo, New York. His first love was percussion, but he soon discovered a passion for composition and wrote his first work at age thirteen. He continued to study both percussion and composition at the Eastman School of Music, with composers such as Christopher Rouse and Samuel Adler, and percussionist John Beck. Among his many achievements, Paterson's music has been performed in the United States, Australia, Asia, Europe and Africa by ensembles such as the Louisville Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, the New York New Music Ensemble and the Russian Chamber Orchestra, to name a few. He has also received many awards, such as the Copland Award and the Society for New Music's Brian M. Israel Prize.


Freya's Tears was written for and dedicated to Marc Uys and Jacqueline Kerrod, who are the chamber music duo 'Clockwise'. Both Jacqueline and Marc are advocates of new music and they often perform and commission new works. Freya's Tears is a companion piece for another of Paterson's works, The Book of Goddesses, (for flute, harp and percussion). Similarly to The Book of Goddesses, each of the movements in Freya's Tears is inspired by a different goddess: Iris, Freya, and Sekhmet.

In Greek mythology, Iris is the goddess of sea and sky, and the messenger of the Olympian gods. She is usually depicted with golden wings and a herald's rod or a water-pitcher, and is the personification of the rainbow. In movement one, Iris, Paterson was particularly inspired by the image of Iris the messenger as she travelled on rainbows in her journeys to and from the gods and mortals; this can be heard at the end of the movement with the arcing lines in the harp and then pizzicato in the violin. In both Iris and Sekhmet, Paterson calls for an optional specialised mute on the harp, called the 'Kerrod' mute. In Iris, the 'xylophonic' technique is employed instead where possible to create the same effect. In Sekhmet it is omitted.



The second movement, Freya's Tears, is inspired by Freya, a sacred goddess of love, fertility and beauty in Norse Paganism. She is known for her golden hair, blue eyes, and her most treasured possession, the amber and ruby Brisings' necklace crafted by four dwarfs. She was married to the God Od who mysteriously disappeared; when she could not find him, she was distraught and wept tears of gold. Any tears that hit trees turned to amber, or Freya's Tears. Paterson has used harmonics, glissandi and fragile arpeggios in the violin and harp throughout this movement to evoke these images of mourning and loss.

Movement three is inspired by the Egyptian sun goddess, Sekhmet. She is the goddess of war and healing, whose name is said to mean "the powerful one". She is depicted as having a human body with a lioness's head; being the fiercest hunter known to the Egyptians, she is said to have an uncontrollable temper. In Sekhmet, the use of changing time signatures and accents represent her fierceness of character and her prowess in warfare. The augmented and sometimes dissonant intervals used throughout lend an almost Arabian quality, evoking images of foreign lands.