November 12, 2014

Written in 2014, for solo piano (3 minutes)

November 12, 2014 is a short, slightly sporadic work for solo piano exploiting the overtone series with the sostenuto pedal. The work is full of short burst of energy in key-stokes, but has a hanging suspension of harmonics above. These two ideas working together create an interesting sound-world of explosion and diffusion.

This is the earliest piece that I’ve kept around in my portfolio: prior to 2014 most of my work was closer to performance art, mostly text scores and garish graphic scores heavily ripping off Cage, Dada, Fluxus, and whatever “experimental” idea I found online or in a book or something. I went to Norway in January 2014 for a semester exchange and didn’t write more than a few sketches of things, but otherwise spent that time to discover myself and get over some personal issues- including figuring out what the hell I wanted to do with my music. This was the first piece I really, carefully wrote out every single note, planned the structure, and did all the proper “composerly” duties we are told we should. On the one hand, it sounds quite different than most of my work, but I can hear a lot of ideas there- the most obvious is probably resonance, some sense of pan-diatonic clustering, etc.

I’m not entirely sure why I’ve kept this piece in my portfolio… inertia? Nostalgia? Sentimental attachment? I do still have a soft spot for the piece, and a number of people have performed it, so maybe it’s a mix of things. Some parts of the piece I still find surprising and somewhat clever, some parts I laugh at how cliche they are (who hasn’t tried a sostenuto pedal piece?), but this is the earliest piece I have that I’m not embarrassed by. Every once in a while someone emails me asking for it or saying they played it, and that always warms my heart, so I’m happy to keep it around.

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 October 5th for solo crotales (2016), and March 8th for solo piano (2018). The number of “date pieces” used to be rather substantial but I have withdrawn most of them, and a number of other pieces that began with a dated title but were completed with something better.