Wendy began performing the Sonata, and the day after Halloween, I drove up to NY to hear her perform it right near her home, magically only a mile from the banks of the Hudson - and just across the river from the legendary Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which is as beautiful (especially during leaf season) as it is creepy. There was enough time to visit this landmark, and it was breathtaking to visit the tombstones of Washington Irving (who wrote "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"), along with many other well-known writers, activists, and familiar historical names, as well as troops from Revolutionary War battles in the Hudson Valley. There was apparently no way out of the cemetery just as a darkened sky turned to a downpour, and evidently the one-way road signs had been Halloween-pranked into a closed loop to prevent tourists from leaving.

Soon after Wendy's wonderful Sonata performance, I got an email: she was starting a flute duo with Kathleen Nester, and they asked me to write them a piece for 2 Bass Flutes and Piano. In fast succession, I was thrilled, then awed by the sonorities this offered; then the beautiful creepiness this musical color suggested struck me as so reminiscent of my visit to Sleepy Hollow that the concept of the piece presented itself from the start.

Between my love of the bass flute and the delicately macabre inspiration, many musical ideas soon began forming. And then another odd coincidence: as I was getting started on the commission, a newly-produced reissue of The Beatles' White Album was released, along with extensive histories, one of which documents the making of Revolution 9, the notoriously chilling "musique concrète" Beatles track that had haunted me since childhood, especially the backwards music loops. When I read in the essays that one of the collage fragments in Revolution 9 is a short phrase from Robert Schumann's Symphonic Etudes for Piano with the audio played backwards, I became so fascinated with this phrase, which oddly was related to the music I'd already written, that some of the melodic fragments in Sleepy Hollow actually come from the Schumann, equally creepy both backwards and forwards.

Wendy Stern and Kathleen Nester premiered Sleepy Hollow with pianist Katie Leung at the 2019 annual convention of the National Flute Association, just before the world shut down for Covid. There's a beautiful YouTube presentation using the premiere's audio recording, with a moving video collage that fits the music perfectly.