Mariam and I have not written a programme note as we don’t really want to say much. I can tell you that the nature of the collaboration is that Mariam and I each have roles, but we very much composed the work together. My role was to compose the orchestral music and Mariam composed her own part. Sometimes I would compose something and she would add her part, other times she would send me a recording of something she had made and I would write orchestral music around it. We worked out the form together. The work is heterogeneous in terms of musical style, between scenes and even within scenes. We wanted to make a divine collision of lots of things we love. The piece also references the soloist/orchestra dynamic with allusions to recitative and the concerto. 

Matthew Shlomowitz