In the Summer

written in 2020 for piano trio (11 minutes)

I wrote this piece during the Summer of 2020 – aka: “peak pandemic.” To be perfectly honest, I hardly remember the process or what was going on at the time that I wrote this. Listening through the piece and following the score and even playing it at the piano again brings out these little glimmers, but nothing particularly enlightening for this note. I remember practicing these wide jumps and repetitive gestures again and again to try and make them as smooth as possible; I remember living at my desk throughout the summer, trying to write as much as I could and probably compartmentalizing and trying to avoid doom-scrolling as much as I could as well.

 Perhaps you can hear this in the music: The piece feels like it is wandering and trying to find something; repeated figures, again and again, a sort of ambiguous melancholy – but I don’t want to read too much into that and paint an idea that isn’t really there. I can hear the relationship this piece has with so much of my other music from the time: these diatonic clusters, two-note gestures repeated over and over, etc. Without spoiling it: there is a little figure in the piano – triplets – and I remember thinking I was rather cleaver for that.

 I think this is piece was just something I did – maybe something I needed to do. I made it because I made it, and I made it in the summer.