flute, violin, and harpsichord (2018)
1. Sampler (shuffle)
2. Mending by Candlelight
3. Sewing Machine
4. More Mending by Candlelight
5. Embroidery
6. The Industrialization of Needlework
duration: 11′
program note
Thread (2018) was commissioned by flutist Wendy Stern for Triolet, her ensemble with violinist Shelby Yamin and harpsichordist Joyce Lindorff. Its six brief movements reflect some of the history of women’s work with thread, from the intimate, almost meditative act of mending to later industrial millwork.
Through a long friendship with the writer Jane Brox, I’ve been fascinated by the history of electricity and of artificial light, by the mechanization of housework, and by the industrialization of the textile industry. I wrote a chamber opera, Rural Electrification, while Jane was writing her critically acclaimed Brilliant: the Evolution of Artificial Light (which includes a chapter on rural electrification). Other influential books were Never Done, a History of American Housework, by Susan Strasser; Brox’s Five Thousand Days Like This One: an American Family History, with its section on the Lowell mills; Rebecca Chace’s Leaving Rock Harbor; Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls; and the Lowell Offering (a collection of writing by the young women who came to work in the Lowell, MA textile mills in the early industrial revolution).
The harpsichord is especially good at representing the sewing machine and other mechanisms, in addition to its historical overtones. Early music remains popular, while many forms of handwork are enjoying a renaissance among young people – perhaps a hunger for the tactile and physical in a digital age. Certainly any musician who puts in the necessary hours of practice understands the rewards of the physical repetition of patterns.