"Tracings was composed in March, 2000 for a recital given by Erin Cooper-Gay. In our collaboration we discussed exploring the jazz-ballad idiom, whose primary influence comes in the laid-back nature of this brief work, though other gestural and harmonic debts are owed to that genre as well. I had the notion of letting the hornist warm-up on stage, blowing some long tones and feeling the instrument out in a loose sense of time over a discrete, but throbbing pulse. In the course of noodling around the horn player begins "tracing" over the beginning of the well-known solo from Tchaikovsky¹s 5th symphony, which smoothly spins off into an original tune, becoming the piece¹s refrain."

~ Peter Gilbert