Bread and Roses for Violin Solo (1976)

Bread and Roses was a marching—one could say for the "bread"—and lyrical—the "roses"—song, written in 1912 during the great mill strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. It caught the voices and aspirations of the women who were, extraordinarily, taking a public part in the strike (the ensuing publicity was a crucial factor in the strike's success). The piece uses the original tune by Carol Kohlsaat (Mimi Fariña made a new one in the sixties when the song was revived in connection with the women's movement) and a harmonization of the tune as the material for freely stitched together sections of variations. Towards the beginning a part of the tune appears once directly with its harmonization. The piece was written in 1976. In both pieces there is in the final sections a kind of sustained extension, reaching out, that I think of as in the character of the song.