My music for string instruments

Just a few weeks after my music score of Rapsodia Nusantara 6-10 was published, my music for string instruments will have their turn to be published. In this book there will be some "old" and quite popular pieces of mine, such as my short String Quartet "Lontano" which was commissioned by the great violinist Midori Goto, my pieces for violin & piano Sweet Sorrow and The Sleepers, my Tango (I forgot the exact title, but it's a tango anyway) for cello and piano etc. Apart from all the pieces included in this book, you can also find my music for violin & piano in Alicia's 3rd Piano Book, where my piece Sadness Becomes Her and some music written for films can be found. But new pieces were included too, and I wrote some program notes for them, and here they are. ............................................................................................................................................. Both Sweet Sorrow and The Sleepers are commissioned by Fundacion Musica Abierta in Spain, which deals with disabled (young) musicians. Both pieces for violin & piano are written for a pianist with only 2 functional fingers in his/her right hand. Both pieces are also inspired by excerpts of phrases by my favorite writers, Shakespeare & Whitman. Sweet Sorrow is recited by Juliet to Romeo when parting: "Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good night till it be morrow.", while The Sleepers is inspired by the long poem bearing the same title by Walt Whitman. I quoted some phrases on the score: "The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed, They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed .... They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of the night and awake." ............................................................................................................................................. My "mini trio", A Farm Picture was written just in a few minutes in an explosive burst of inspiration. The very short but powerful poem of Whitman (yes, him again) immediately triggered that sound in my head, a placid, rustic texture of flute, viola and piano, but a few months later I went back to the score to revise it and found out that the wind & string instruments can change place in this piece, hence it can be played by a violin, clarinet & piano. I just had the combination of a wind and a string instrument in this music. The poem just consists of 3 lines : Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn / A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding / And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away. ............................................................................................................................................. I always think that my song, Jemari Menari ("Dancing Fingers") is too short, and I always wanted to expand it. Well, it's based on a very short poem by Nanang Suryadi, and I want it to become a vocal piece, not someone singing accompanying a virtuosic pianist! So I decided to make a kind of "fantasy" on it, and since I like the register of a viola, I started to do a kind of toccata-fantasy based on it. The whole melody appears in the middle of the piece, but I already give hints of its naughty rhythms from the beginning. I wrote this piece in the nice business lounge of Frankfurt airport where I had to wait 4 hours for the connecting flight earlier this year, accompanied by my favorite drink : orange juice with a few drops (well, more than drops, and more than few) of Campari. The music certainly has that taste, a kind of bittersweet excitement. The original poem, which I used for the original piece for middle voice and piano, is as such : menarilah / jemari menari / melukis udara kosong / dengan jemari / menarilah jemari / mengukir hari / menatah mimpi