Finland Isn't That Far

Written in 2015, for piano and chamber orchestra (11 minutes)

Various orchestrations exist, including more typical instrumentation, but the original piece is given here.

Finland Isn’t That Far is a short piano concerto in two parts for solo piano and chamber orchestra. The piece is reflective, somewhat melancholic or nostalgic, and slowly unfolds in a slow kaleidoscope of instrumental color. Finland Isn’t That Far is the first piece in my portfolio that I feel like is actually in my voice, and part of the overall aesthetic I was searching for before 2015 and there are so many moments in this piece that signal a lot of the ideals I would explore in the future.

This is another piece that I get asked about the title with some regularity. I used to be rather grumpy about the idea of “absolute music” versus “programmatic music”, but I think this is probably just a weird relic of academia- maybe some sort of pseudo-intellectual war between modernism and romanticism or some other tired old debate… I can't say honestly if this piece is really or actually “about” anything, but when I wrote the short piano solo, I was thinking about the reverse culture shock that happened to me when I was coming back from studying in Norway. I genuinely consider my life to be broken up into two parts: pre- and post-Norway. This is probably an artifact of my privilege, but that adventure in Norway changed my life and is something I consider to be the moment where I transitioned from provincial man and became a global citizen. I learned so much about myself and began to dream about what I wanted to do and who I wanted to become- part of that meant leaving my home forever. On the one hand, that was a scary and sad idea, but I was also missing my friends around the world. Specifically, I was in conversation with my friend Heidi about visiting her in Finland. So, in many ways, this piece is a meditation on my home and perhaps a new detachment from it, my friends and the new ones I may never see again, and where I wanted to go, what I wanted to become, and who I wanted to be.

From a construction standpoint the piece was written rather quickly, but took a while to formulate itself into the piece I’m showing you now. At first, I wanted to write another piano solo coming off the tails of my piece November 12, 2014 (2014), exploring resonance and acoustic phenomena. The original plan was to write the piano solo, which is now the first half of the final piece, but I wanted to find a way that the strings could resonate infinitely using strictly acoustic means. Now I know a lot more about this stuff than I did in 2014/15, but I wanted to take a large speaker (my 8x10 bass cabinet) and blast a D0 - 18.354 Hz sine wave at the soundboard of the piano. In my mind, this would cause the strings to resonate a D harmonic series but you wouldn’t hear the sub frequency. Technically, this worked- the strings did sympathetically vibrate, but you needed to crank the sine wave so much that it was nauseating and impractical. A fun idea, but not at all the piece I wanted to make.

After some reconsideration, I decided to keep the piano solo as-is and then present the piano solo again- nearly verbatim but with the resonating frequencies of the instrument orchestrated out across the ensemble.