In the summer of 1977, when I composed this music, my wife and I were constructing a picket fence around our first home, a little, yellow, clapboard house in the village of Bellville, Ohio. The task is repetitive; pickets are identical. Yet the undertaking was exciting and satisfying; the fence delineated our tiny estate, rendering it charmingly, cheerily old-fashioned.

Like our picket fence, this music takes its shape from the repetition of a very simple motive: up a half step, down a half step, nothing more. A musical triangle, like the top end of a picket.

The little motif finds its way through a series of episodes, just as the our fence zig-zagged along the edges and corners of our little yard, punctuated by three gates.

This piece was originally scored for oboe and strings but I re-scored it for violin, oboe and piano in 2010 because I felt that the piece’s quartal harmonies would sound better on the piano than they do in the strings.

Just to be sure I’m not losing you here … a ‘quartal’ chord is built out of notes that are a fourth apart, i.e., four steps apart from each other on a musical scale. Triadic chords are more usual, and are built out of thirds, i.e. notes that are three steps apart. Strings are made to play triads and they resonate best when the music is triadic. Pianos, contrariwise, can play any combination of notes without altering the instrument’s resonance.

Growing up as a kid who played the piano, which sounds equally good in any key, I didn’t realize that stringed instruments actually sound better in some keys than others. That’s why so many classical string works are written in D major or A major. String players are happiest performing music written in those keys because those keys make their instruments sound rich, bright, fulsome.

I learned this trick the hard way. When I was about 30, I wrote a piece for violin in A flat major. In rehearsal, the violinist showed me how much better it would have sounded if I had written it a half step higher, in A major. He played it for me in both keys and I was amazed at the difference.

Why hadn’t anyone told me this until then? It’s a great example of the innumerable little tricks composers pick up along the way. All our lives, we’re learning.

To hear Picket Fence played by oboist Amy Dennison, violinist Marion Peraza de Webb and pianist Naoko Tanaka, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.