Toys in the Attic

The second of these Two little night pieces for three violas d'amore is a great way to get into the Halloween spirit. There is nothing quite like twenty-one sympathetic strings ringing along with the twenty-one bowed strings in an ensemble of three violas d'amore. Thank you Gheorge and Simona Balan for asking me to write a piece for them to play with Yvain Delahousse, and thank you all for playing it so beautifully.

In the attics of the town, the dolls begin to wake. These are not dolls in the freshness of their youth, the dolls who dwell in children's bedrooms, but old, abandoned dolls, no longer believed in. They lean back against boxes of old dishes, sit slumped on broken-backed chairs, lie face down on attic floorboards. . . .

. . . But on this summer night, when the almost full moon wakens sleepers in their beds, the dolls in their long slumber begin to stir . . .

From "The Dolls Wake" in Steven Millhauser's Enchanted Night.