2 SIDES OF A PENNY
2 Sides of a Penny comes from my score for Anna Chi’s short film 2 Pennies, set in 1970s China. A girl finds a penny and is tempted to take a second one from her mother to afford a movie ticket. When she confesses, her mother takes her to the film herself.
To me, mother and daughter are two sides of the same penny: sometimes at odds, but never truly apart.
Instrumentation
Solo Viola
Duration
5 minutes
Year Composed
2026
Commission & Premiere Info
From the score for Anna Chi’s short film 2 Pennies. Premiered by Quincy Tilles.
Program Notes
It’s rare for a film score to feature the viola as its main solo voice, and I didn’t plan on it either when I began scoring Anna Chi’s short film 2 Pennies. The film is a bittersweet story of a mother and her young daughter in 1970s China. It begins when the girl finds a penny by the side of the road. She hopes to use it to see a new Indian film she’s enthralled by, but a ticket costs two pennies, and she is tempted to take the second one from her mother.
Running beneath the film is the melody of “I Found a Penny by the Roadside,” a Chinese children’s song about a child who finds a penny and hands it in to a police officer. In the end, the girl comes clean to her mother. Instead of scolding her, the mother takes her to the theater and watches the film with her. What mattered was never the movie. It was the time they shared.
To me, mother and daughter are two sides of the same coin. They don’t always agree, and at times they seem to stand on opposite sides. But they are still the same penny, and the bond between them runs deeper than anything that divides them.
I first wrote the mother’s voice for cello, then for erhu. At the recording session in Los Angeles, though, the only player we could record live was a violist, and he happened to be one of the best: David Samuel, who was in LA working with me on another research project. The director immediately felt the viola was the perfect voice for the mother. I rewrote the cello and erhu parts for viola on the spot, and David recorded them that day.
This solo gathers that music into one piece. A free, rubato opening shifts between pizzicato, glissandi, and the glassy sound of sul ponticello. It accelerates into a lively Allegretto and then returns to the hushed opening, like a coin turned over and back again.