About the Music

A hop skip and a jump away for bass clarinet, violin, and piano was written in 2023 for the composition program at the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.

Its musical form, the adventure, mirrors a typical narrative schema in literature. Characters, anthropomorphized in the melodies of the bass clarinet, violin, and piano, are introduced until a perturbing element causes phases of action and resolution. Instruments alternatively endorse roles of main, opposing, and supporting characters, telling a universal story of tension and reconciliation onto which the listener is free to superimpose details of settings, personalities, and events.

The piece should be performed like a play. Player-actors can take many liberties to exaggerate aspects of the characters they embody, be it their quirkiness, their best traits, their defects, or the drama of the events they trigger and navigate, so that a different story may be told each time.

At their core, many stories we tell share the same motions, regardless of where and when they are told and by whom. A hop skip and a jump away celebrates the universality of human culture while providing a structure for particular narratives to emerge.

Piano score: 27 pages, spiral bound; parts: 7 pages each, booklet. Extended-range instrument NOT required for bass clarinet part.

Hard Copy Edition

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About the Composer

Justine Gagnepain is a student of music composition at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She is honing her craft as a composer by writing quirky and heartfelt pieces rooted in themes like belonging, attachment, and resilience. Justine was drawn to composition by writing choral music and is now expanding her repertoire by diving into a wider range of instruments and ensembles.