The Maze is a violin concerto about one of Utah’s most spectacular wild places: The Maze District of Canyonlands National Park, famous for its intricate network of interlocking canyons filled with ancient pictographs, natural arches, and monolithic rock formations.
Composer Nathan Lincoln de Cusatis backpacked through The Maze in March 2019, spending six days covering almost the entirety of the district from its entrance at the Maze Overlook to the Colorado and Green River confluence and circling back again. “When Madeline asked me to write a violin concerto, I immediately thought of taking one of Utah’s iconic natural landscapes and using it as inspiration for a new work with Madeline’s solo violin acting as a musical guide through the wilderness. I wrote this piece to try to capture the mystery and magic of what I found there.”
World Premiere: June 24, 2021; National Orchestral Institute at Wolf Trap. Marin Alsop, Conductor.
Western US Premiere: January 27-29, 2022; Utah Symphony. Thierry Fischer, Conductor.
UPCOMING: February 8, 2025: Wheeling Symphony Orchestra (WV). John Gennaro Devlin, Conductor.
Click to download: The Maze - Perusal Score
Listen to the World Premiere:
I. Echoes - The “chord of mystery” that opens the movement is a spectral sonority that evokes the eerie solitude of the desert landscape from which the violinist slowly enters out of the harmonics of the violin section. She immediately plays “the echo”, a dramatic nose-dive arpeggio whose residue is echoed back in a ping-pong patterns through the section violins one stand at a time. “The echo” also marks our starting point in The Maze, and like any maze the soloist will keep getting lost throughout the piece; “the echo” will return twice later on where the soloist makes a wrong turn only to end up back where she began.
II. The Overlook - The Overlook is spot above the entrance to The Maze that gives the most iconic view of the geological layers of mud rock and sandstone that have been eroded away slowly over time. This movement captures the idea of canyon formation by beginning with a modulating “erosion theme”: a simple descending scalar line that lowers one note every repetition as it continues to dissolve down through different keys. The remainder of the movement is a kinetic toccata-like struggle where the soloist descends The Overlook Trail, a half-mile of near-vertical drop-off that leads down into the canyon. The soloist chases the erosion theme breathlessly around the orchestra through a series of fast-changing tableaux until she finally arrives at the bottom of The Maze and looks up at the grandeur of the canyon walls around her while the orchestra soars into a triumphant chorale on the passacaglia theme. Suddenly, however, “the echo” reappears and she is right back where she began.
III. Pictographs - This movement is inspired by The Harvest Scene, a wall of pictographs near the entrance to The Maze. The scene is dominated by one particular anthropomorphic figure extending an arm from which a tree grows surrounded by rabbits and birds suggesting a moment of creation. The opening gesture of this movement, a low growl in the basses and timpani followed by fluttering flutes and violins and the ghostly ring of the water gong, represents this moment when the tree and animals burst forth from the horned god’s outstretched hand. Between these sonic eruptions the soloist sings a lamentoso melody in double-stops that seems to ponder the enigmatic imagery of the pictographs. The middle section is a tour down the rock wall canvas where faded images of birds and small mammals emerge in ochre hues, portrayed by a short spiraling gesture in the winds. Moved by the beauty of the images she leads the orchestra into an accelerating climax until once again we circle back in the maze to the beginning of the movement with the thundering theme of the horned god.
IV. The Confluence -This rapid-fire toccata represents the flowing energy of the Green and Colorado rivers as they cascade towards their meeting point in a massive canyon below the Maze. The Green River is set in rhythmic groupings of three and the Colorado in groups of two creating a shifting polyrhythmic canvas behind the soloist as she rides the rapids down towards the confluence, shifting between duple and triple meters as our birds-eye view shifts from river to river. Another modulating “erosion passacaglia” forms the basis for the movement, this time always modulating down in thirds representing the rivers slowly cutting into the deep canyons that form the most stunning landscape features of the high desert plateau. The confluence is finally reached when the soloist whips the rest of the orchestra in a boiling fury with a high soaring melody in the horns. Suddenly the labyrinthine paths of The Maze bring us back again to “the echo” and after a short cadenza the soloist leads us through a coda finally finding her way out of The Maze by shooting up out of the canyon on a dramatic unison thunderclap in the full orchestra.
