I Should Have Known a Better Romance

…I Should Have Known a Better Romance… was written for the Belgian Kugoni Trio on a commission from the Gaudeamus Festival, selected through its international call for scores, and premiered by them — Kurt Bertels (saxophone), Bert Koch (piano) and Nicolas Dupont (violin) — at Gaudeamus Muziekweek in Utrecht on 8 September 2019. It lasts a little over five minutes.

The title is the kind of sentence one says about a relationship long afterwards, and the piece has that after-the-fact quality: it keeps replaying a scene and flinching. The violin plays almost entirely flautando, with loose bow pressure, a veiled, airy sound whose pitch is allowed to be indefinite; the saxophone answers in quarter-tones and, at one point, puts the instrument down and scratches the edge of its music stand with a chopstick. The piano supplies a romance — a real one, with a tune — but only in fragments, and each time the fragment comes back it has been slightly corrupted, like a memory that is being edited by the person remembering.

The ellipses around the title are there because the sentence is never finished in the piece either.