This piece was prompted by two factors: first, Jenny Koh, for whom Sprung Testament was commissioned, asked if I could imagine writing a piece for piano and violin that could serve as a sister-work to Beethoven’s Spring Sonata. Initially I planned to write four movements, but opted for three instead (at least for the time being), based roughly on the proportions and sentiments of the Beethoven—a piece I had worked on as a young pianist.

Sprung Testament is also part of a larger project called Limitless, in which Jenny commissioned duos in order to perform them with the composers themselves. Having not performed publicly in seven years, this unique engagement brought about a substantial personal challenge of getting over old fears and reckoning with past demons. Though of course my issues were not nearly of the same scope as Beethoven’s, I found myself inspired rereading his famous Heiligenstadt Testament from 1802, a letter written to his brothers describing his despair over his hearing troubles and his passionate resolve to overcome his physical and emotional issues to fulfill his artistic aspirations.

The second source of inspiration for the project was the discovery of Rose-Lynn Fisher’s stunning book “The Topography of Tears”. I was immediately drawn to her duotone microscopic photographs of tears captured on glass slides. These images reminded me of macro-topographic shots of sprawling landscapes, yet were also weirdly delicate, poetically complex, and intimate. In her book, Fisher gives captions to each image, translating the visuals into something evocative of our interior lives. The captions of the images that inspired the composition have been added as subtitles for the movements, though these are meant for the performers alone, much like the titles of Debussy’s preludes.