Nico
Muhly,

This commission has been made possible by the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Chamber Music America Endowment Fund.

Fast Dances is a series of five short movements for two harps. Each movement is a sort of rhythmic étude with slowly shifting harmonies. The first movement takes a few perpetual motion lines and splits them, pitch by pitch, between the two players. The second movement is a game about dividing the measures simultaneously into 2, 3, and 6. The third movement — the slowest — is a meditation on a long, slow, downwards scale, with one harp playing 5 beats to the bar and the other playing 4. The fourth movement is quiet and anxious, and the fifth is anxious, loud, and fast.