Commissioned by Gregory Fulkerson, Professor of Violin, The Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

Gregory Fulkerson, violin; Thomas Rosenkranz, piano

Fulkerson writes:

Andrew Shapiro is a composer and songwriter living in Brooklyn. I first met him during his senior year at Oberlin when he acted as an audio assistant for my 1998 Merkin Hall concert in New York. I reconnected with him by chance in 2012, and we discussed working together to develop a violin sonata.

I love the forthright and amiable spirit that permeates the piece; it is definitely in a pop style, yet he handles the standard acoustic sonorities deftly and there is a wealth of detail in the patterns of the violin. I don’t know anything else quite like it.

Shapiro writes:

Shortly after The High Line opened, a friend of mine was running the High Line Ranger program and needed people to patrol the park and answer visitor questions. I thought this could be a very interesting way to learn about the place. So I just sort of fell into a job as a High Line Ranger and worked there every Saturday for a year.

When there weren’t huge mobs of people around (and it wasn’t absolutely freezing), I often found myself near the top of the Gansevoort stairs contemplating the view of the river. After a while I got the idea to write a few sweet and simple pieces of music about it at different times of the day.


GREGORY FULKERSON'S debut recording on New World Records was chosen one of the year’s best by The New York Times and his Bridge recording of the complete Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin by J.S. Bach was chosen one of the Best CDs of 2000 by The New Yorker magazine. He performed the title role in the 1992 revival of the Philip Glass opera, Einstein on the Beach, for a total of 48 performances on four continents, and later recorded the work for Nonesuch.