NOCTURNE IN PARALLAX

• for violin, cello, & piano (piano trio)

• completed 2025

• duration ca. 6 minutes

program note

NOCTURNE IN PARALLAX is a piano trio composed with a simple goal in mind: creating melodies that can stand on their own two feet—lines that earn your attention, keep it, and then haunt you a little after they’re gone. To get there, I wanted to keep the material lean, testing how little I could use and still make a melody feel necessary, memorable, and a bit dangerous.

At the beginning of the piece, I had a specific image in mind: driving at night on a deserted Southern California desert highway. It was a Lynchian cocktail for me—dark and seductive, nostalgic but vaguely wrong—like Twin Peaks’ dreamy fog rolling into the hard glare of Lost Highway. David Lynch has always been a major influence on my creative thinking.

“Parallax” is the phenomenon in which an object seems to shift position depending on where you’re standing (or moving) as you look at it. In this trio, that idea shows up in a musical perspective: lines move at different speeds, drifting past each other, briefly aligning, then slipping out of sync again.

From that opening drive, the music continues outward toward the horizon. The parallax first shows up in the melodic motion but gradually seeps into the harmonic world as well. The harmony behaves like the same landscape seen from different lanes. The mountains in the distance move much more slowly than the mile markers zooming by. The result, I hope, is a kind of nocturnal continuity—one long look out the windshield, where the scenery keeps shifting but the destination stays politely unclear.

-SC