The initial concept and inspiration for Arlo came to me in the first week of May 2018 while visiting my daughter, Emily, and newly born son, Everett, in Arlington, Virginia.

I finished this short work on May 31, 2018, at 7:06pm. When I closed the page I noted the time, and it felt complete.

I had been building a website to feature my compositions from the past 50-ish years and to make them freely available to the public. This had kept me busy physically and mentally, developing the structure of the website as well as determining the best way to present the works, including MP3 audio format, MP4 video format (for some works following the score, and some with photographic imagery), and with scrollable and downloadable PDFs to follow along with the audio.

It remains a mystery to me why exactly I so named this piece, rather than Everett or Emily, or even Arlington. It has almost a forlorn character to it, perhaps melancholy to some; neither was my intent, as that was a joyous time.

It came first as the open two bars in the piano. Their piano was sitting next to the stairwell and as I was about to go upstairs to my room, I felt the impulse to stop and play the chords. I continued upstairs, when to a desk and wrote it down, pencil to paper—just like the old days. Then I entered the notes into my notation program and sketched out the rest of the chord progression, this time one mouse-click at a time. The idea for the melody came shortly after, and in the next few weeks I completed the piece.

For such a short work, these are disproportionately long program notes. Still, the piece has a soft spot in my heart, and I feel like sharing.

The original version was for violin, but after a while I felt the sonorous depth of the viola more closely matched the character of the piece. I made the violin part available for download.

The viola, in my opinion, is a too often overlooked choice for solo instrument and expressiveness.

Performance time: approximately 2’20"

Vanessa McClintock