Hot Potato, for flute, bass clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, percussion, piano, violin, viola, cello, and contrabass, offers three different perspectives on the simple idea of sharing of material between instruments in an ensemble. The first movement (also titled “Hot Potato”) is a study in hocket—a rhythmic technique in which a single melody is shared between two or more voices, such that one voice sounds while the others rest. Nearly every note in the movement is woven, via hocket, into a larger melody or texture involving multiple instruments. Melodies and chord progressions are tossed back and forth rapidly, not unlike the “hot potato” in the children’s game of the same name. By contrast, the second movement (“Flying Colors”) allows instruments to share the same melodic and rhythmic material, but with a constantly-changing timbre, as the voices stagger their entrances and exits, all components of a single unison line.
The final movement (“Sine Qua Non”) is about the way different thematic elements combine to occupy the same musical space. It contains four principal themes: an opening melody (heard at the outset in the lowest instruments), a running sixteenth-note texture built from stacked thirds, a quasi-baroque fanfare with trills, and a chord progression borrowed from the first movement. Each is developed on its own and then combined with the themes that have come before; the climactic moment, therefore, occurs just after the introduction of the fourth and final theme, when all four motives are heard simultaneously. That four contrasting ideas would fit together seamlessly doesn’t happen by coincidence, of course—the climactic section had to have been composed first. It is the sine qua non of the entire movement: without it, the preceding sections could not have existed.
The first movement of Hot Potato was written in 2011 and first performed in a workshop at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio by the Slee Sinfonietta with conductor James Baker. It was revised in 2015. The second and third movements were added in 2016, and premiered at the 2016 Midwest Composers Symposium in Iowa City, Iowa by the University of Iowa Center for New Music with conductor David Gompper.
Recording: first movement: The Slee Sinfonietta; James Baker, conductor (Cleveland, Ohio, 2011); second movement: The University of Iowa Center for New Music; David Gompper, conductor (Iowa City, Iowa, 2016); third movement: musicians of the Jacobs School of Music; Corey K. Rubin, conductor (Bloomington, Indiana, 2016)
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