Duplicitous Fits and Starts was written for my Plymouth State University colleague Carleen Graff, and premiered by her at PSU in 1995. She’s played it at other venues, including Southern Methodist University. Lucia Unrau has also played it, at Bluffton College in Ohio.
The title exactly describes the musical material of the piece, which keeps getting derailed just as it gets going, until the very end of the piece. It’s about the various negative states that pop up as the spiritually-striving individual works towards enlightenment – the makyo that plague the Zen practitioner on the way to satori, the false idols that tempt the Christian working toward salvation, etc.
