Photograph by Scott Ordway (Berlin, 2010)

The Memory of Snow (2025)

concerto for violin and string orchestra / 10 minutes

PREMIERE

Composed for Ruda Lee and the Anima Ensemble

Premiere: 22 November 2025 at Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall (New York, NY)
Ruda Lee, violin; Anima Ensemble; Vivian Ip, conductor

Buy Tickets

MEDIA

perusal score

NOTE

In 1994, the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa published The Memory Police, a haunting work of speculative fiction about an island on which one object after another simply disappears. After each disappearance, the inhabitants of the island quickly lose all memory of that which was lost. Item by item they lose birds, ribbon, perfume, poems, green beans, roses, and much else besides. When violinist Ruda Lee asked me to consider a new violin concerto to feature alongside Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, I thought immediately of Ogawa’s novel. In our own time, we are living through the slow disappearance of winter.

The Memory of Snow for violin and string orchestra is a reflection on loss and change in a warming world. It began with my own memories of the snowbound alpine landscapes of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Northern California, but the title also refers to what we are losing together: the cultural and ecological memory of snow as a shaping force in human life.

Sonically, I reject the traditional soloist role of heroic virtuosity, instead positioning the violinist as a witness moving through a landscape and as a proxy for our collective feeling as we watch the familiar change and fade. The violinist is a small figure on wide canvas, but also represents our subjectivity, our emotional intensity, and our rage in the face of something that feels unstoppable. Rather than dramatizing the opposition of soloist and ensemble, it dissolves that hierarchy, creating a single evolving tapestry of sound. Although the work places considerable demands on the soloist, it is anti-virtuosic, aligned instead with my broader aesthetic of slowness, stillness, and emotional interiority, requiring extremes of concentration, of intensity, of sound production, and of expressive range.

The Memory of Snow invites listeners to remember the landscapes that formed them and to imagine the fragile beauty of a world now in flux. The work is dedicated to and premiered by artists from Hong Kong, a place where snow is almost mythic, but where the fragility of the natural world is strikingly tangible.

In the Kingdom of Bells is a meditation on a simple, but fantastical idea: I imagine the sound of all the world’s bells ringing at once.

I think about what might bring this about: something supernatural, perhaps? An unseen force calling bells large and small to life in the course of a single, glorious hour. Or, alternatively, some occasion of such overwhelming and universal joy that we, the community of humanity, organize a global festival of bells as the only commensurate response. 

I think about an ordinary action—like ringing a bell—that becomes unusual when practiced at a group scale, improbable at a city scale, extraordinary at a national scale, and miraculous at a global scale. I celebrate the ways we find to touch a small and simple piece of something immeasurably vast, like setting fingers on the surface of the sea, as well as how we look at something plain and make it magical by dramatically reimagining the possibilities that inhere in it. 

These metaphors extend to, infuse, and define my creative language, which uses music’s most humble elements to build large architectural forms. These metaphors offered both the point of inspiration for and the means to compose In the Kingdom of Bells. 

The piece does not recreate the sonic phenomenon that I imagine—no music ever could—but instead dwells briefly in the emotional world that might accompany such a profound act of human invention and cooperation.

Scott Ordway
Stockholm, August 2018