Music by
DANIEL DORFF
 
The Year of the Rabbit  A Watercolor for 3 C Flutes and Alto Flute (quartet or ensemble)
Duration: c. 7'

DETAILS
PREMIERED by the Columbia Flute Choir at the February 1999 Mid-Atlantic Flute Fair, Bethesda, MD, Alexandra Molnar-Suhajda conducting.
WINNER, 2000 NFA Newly Published Music awards.
NYSSMA list of recommended contest pieces.

HEAR & WATCH a live performance by the Lyra Ensemble.
BUY (the improved 2014 edition) from your favorite sheet music dealer or direct from Presser.

PROGRAM NOTES
 In 1997 I had the fascinating experience of visiting the Taiwan Palace Museum, which holds the majority of art collected from both Taiwan and mainland China from the past several thousand years. This six-story building rotates its display every three months, and the collection is so large that it takes 30 years to show everything.

Seeing those works displayed in June 1997, I was most taken by the many carvings dedicated to the Asian Zodiac cycle. Many artists in various media and styles have depicted the twelve-year animal cycle as a set of stylized carvings or drawings, and I've been eager to create a musical parallel ever since this visit.

In late January 1999, flutist-composer Alexandra Molnar-Suhajda asked if I had any new flute choir music that her ensemble could premiere at the Mid-Atlantic Flute Fair in February. I didn't, but it struck me that a flute choir would be good to portray the "year of the rabbit," which was coincidentally beginning that weekend.Within a few days the piece was started and finished. The music, in various ways, pays homage to the many "Rabbits" in my immediate family, to rabbits in general, and to the Chinese astrological sayings about people born in the year of the rabbit.

THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT is dedicated to Alexandra Molnar-Suhajda, who (I later discovered) was also born in the Year of the Rabbit.

ABOUT THE SECOND EDITION (2014)
The original 1999 edition of THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT was engraved hastily out of concert scheduling necessity; its lack of cues, visual clumsiness, and insufficient cautionaries, has made the music much harder to play than it actually is. This new edition is larger, better spaced, has ample cues and cautionaries, and also has a handful of minor musical revisions to help smooth performance. The composer thanks all the flutists who asked for better parts, and in particular Cindy Anne Broz and Anne Levinson of Flûtes de Salon, and Ellen Fisher Deerberg of the Volanti Flute Quartet, for specific suggestions leading to improved articulations and other idiomatic details.

PERFORMANCE SUGGESTIONS
Challenges in tonguing, fast breaths, and dynamics have been improved in the second edition, which is much better for performance.

THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT may be performed by a quartet or an ensemble. While a solo quartet is the most light and supple, the use of multiple players allows for solo/tutti contrasts and staggered breathing.

REVIEWS
"This second edition comes fifteen years after the original and features larger parts, better spacing, clearer cues, simplified cautionary accidentals, and a few minor musical changes. The work can be played by flute quartet or by an ensemble, though the solo quartet more fully captures the "watercolor" of the title."
            – Flute Talk (Diane Boyd-Schultz), February 2015

"Daniel Dorff always pleases, and his THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT (1999), evidently following a personal Chinese calendar taste, did not disappoint. Dorff is deeply musical, eschews rhetoric, and this piece for eight flutes was charming and unaffected.
            – Penn Sounds (Lou Camp), Summer 1999


  2010 performance at Aspen Music Festival
  all-Dorff children's concert
 
last updated May 25, 2026
home