FLOWER CATALOG
12 preludes for piano

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Flower Catalog PREORDER

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Student Professional Institution

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Details // Concert Prep

Thank you for pre-ordering Flower Catalog!
PDF Score will be sent via email on May 18th.
If you’re anxious to program one of the pieces before then, please just send me an email letting me know after you’ve completed your purchase and I’ll send you that movement.
Purchase is for one copy only, just for you! Please don’t share or else I’ll be sad when I see it in my google alerts ; - )
I want to meet you! Purchase of this pdf in the 23/24 season comes with a 30 min zoom session, if you’d appreciate that during your rehearsal process. You’ll receive scheduling instructions in the delivery email with your music.
I’m excited to help promote your concert(s) on social media and include it on the website!
If you already have a concert date in mind, you’ll receive instructions on sending me concert info in the delivery email with your music.

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Flower Catalog is a set of 12 preludes for piano, each commissioned by a different piano soloist about her own favorite flower. The entire collection can live and breath as a full concert set but each prelude will also be utilized as a uniquely personal encore. Flower Catalog is a commission by Lise de la Salle, Marianne Parker, Diane Katzenberg Braun, Eunbi Kim, Holly Roadfeldt, Adrienne Park, Susie Maddocks, Sarah Bob, Marta Aznavoorian, Jenny Lin, and Lucille Chung.

I grew up in Michigan. Just enough outside Ann Arbor city limits that my parents could give me and my little sister an entire acre of land as our permanent babysitter. Outside violin lessons, all after school activities in all types of weather were simply: two little Boyd girls interacting with a small forest, a bit of creek that flowed into the great Huron River, and the flowers that appeared and disappeared throughout the year.

“I wanted our yard to be an edible yard”, my mother says. She planted an orchard on the side of the house while seven months pregnant with my sister, and she patiently gave us ziplock bags when we declared “we’re going to go pick raspberries and make raspberry jam!” even though she knew the berries would all go straight into our months and the bags would go unused. She taught us which birdsong belonged to which bird, which leaves belonged to which trees, and: the names and natures of the flowers that sprang up season after season without fail.

In the spring there was the thick carpet of lily of the valley that to this day grows alongside the creek, protected by the shadows of the forest growing next to it. The violets that grow nearby bleed into the grass and stay there for a week or two while the earth rumbles back to life in earnest. Daffodils that signaled the end of winter and a forsythia that heralded the end of the school year made sure that there was a continuous bright shock of yellow underneath our childhood bedroom window. The lilac bushes nearby filled the air with their sweet perfume at the end of May when we were able to start wearing our summer clothes again and the days began to become exquisite again—sunshine and humidity and spring breezes making our outdoor experience feel magic.

And often we would be taken five minutes down the road to Grandma’s house. Her garden, small and loved and tended to daily yielded vivid blue and purple morning glories growing up a hand-made trellis that was so much taller than we were. And her yellow rose bush with its small blooms and prickly spines, the honeysuckle hugging the back fence, the black-eyed susans and marigolds that gave their autumnal colors to the far corner of the garden underneath an old, old apple tree.

All this to say that before I began this project, I hadn’t taken the time to recognize how often these flowers were present in the first several chapters of my life...and yet they’re there, photobombing every single outdoor memory in those formative years; memory and flora inextricably entangled. And just as writing this piece has allowed me to revisit the perfume and velvet and translucence of these flowers from the lonely, pandemic-ridden concrete of New York City, I hope that reading about these pieces in this lookbook and listening to them–as their premieres and subsequent performances begin happening– brings you back also, that your own personal journey through the wildlife of your psyche and the flora most akin to your soul is a remarkable one.

FLOWER CATALOG 12 preludes for piano