Cellist/composer Elora Kares performs a movement from her work Piano Trio in G Minor with friends from Cleveland Institute of Music, pianist Young Oh and violinist Anthony Yang.
“I’m Elora Kares, a homeschooled high school junior. My autism gives me more than eight types of multiple cross-linking synesthesia, including an eidetic musical memory. I see music as living colors, called chromesthesia. I get physical bodily sensations from sounds, with triggered emotions from others. I experience numbers & letters as having distinct colors and personalities.
I compose with my synesthesia – by painting colorful layers of sound. This movement of my Piano Trio in G Minor uses the colors red, orange, purple, blue, yellow, and some green. It’s inspired by Astor Piazzolla’s “Spring Piano Trio”, which I see in the same colors, minus green. I experience a section of the Piazzolla as a gondola chase scene in Venice, above an azure blue canal, so my piece also has a water element, represented by a repeating quarter-note-triplets over sextuplets piano passage. The cello solo at the end is a lily pad, not because it sounds or looks like, or emotes ‘lily pad-esque’ energy; but I see it as purple floating on green… like Monet’s lily pads.”
This Daily Joy performance is part of From the Top’s Musicians with Disabilities Special Initiative. This spring, From the Top is spotlighting young disabled and/or neurodivergent musicians who share their talents and tell their stories in their own words.