Wild Rice

Wild Rice was written in May 1996 as a spontaneous response to, and inspired by David Pereira’s colourful performance of new works for cello, and especially those written for his Uluru project. I attempted to combine the evocative high register of the cello with its percussive low counterpart. The slowness of the piece, unusual for my work, has to do with the two images that haunted me at the time of writing. One was a dance character playing an old woman carrying a heavy bag of rice across the wide windy fields, and the other was the Uluru rock.
Elena Kats-Chernin