Forgotten Letters
for piano trio
violin, cello, and piano
1980
11 minutes
Premiered by the Oriana Trio
Parkside, Wisconsin
[Not available for performance]
The musical style I used to compose Cummings Songs was a breakthrough in developing my voice as a composer. Wanting to work more in this vein, I used material from two of those songs as the basis for two movements of a piano trio. Then I added three more movements in a similar style. In 1993 I transcribed it into an orchestral work, Family Letters. In 2010 I realized I was not satisfied with certain aspects of both the trio and its orchestral transcription, so I mined material from the orchestral score to create a new work, City Scenes.—Randall Shinn