March 8th

Written in 2018 for solo piano (11 minutes)

I don't know if anybody's going to believe me for saying this – and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't – but when I wrote this piece, I was actually trying to take inspiration from Irish dance music and do my own thing with it. I am absolutely not convinced that comes through at all, but it's the truth. There are weird games with proportion and rhythm, repetition of audible things, repetition of inaudible things that all come from certain forms. I have neither the energy nor want to go digging through my notebooks to find exactly how this piece worked and explain it here, but that stuff is in there!

Other than that, though, I don't really remember a lot about writing this piece. I have pretty clear memories of sitting in the specific practice room at Bowling Green; I remember certain notes that I took and certain numerological charts, Wikipedia articles on dance forms, and certain highlighters that I used, but there wasn't an occasion for this piece and it wasn't really about or for anything other than wanting to create a piece.

A few months down the line, this was the first piece I played at the University of North Texas when I started my PhD. A friend of mine coming up to me after that show saying “damn, you really did mean quiet didn't you?”

As I said in my notes for November 12, 2014, because I get asked a whole bunch: the date doesn’t mean anything. It is neither the start date nor the completion date of the piece. Rather, it is the date that I decided it was time to pick a title for the piece. I don’t feel like I have a particular talent for picking titles, so I went through a phase of titles that are just dates- a few of them have stuck around: this one, November, and October 5th (2016) for crotales. The number of “date pieces” used to be rather substantial but I have withdrawn most of them, and a number of other pieces that began with a dated title but were completed with something better