Working Toward My Vanishing Points

Written in 2021 for solo piano (25 minutes)

My primary preoccupation with this piece was with gesture; what are the smallest and largest musical gestures, how does resonance form gesture, how can two notes or two cords build a relationship together, how can larger macro-structures have a relationship across expanses time. Throughout the entire piece there are several two note gestures sometimes they're repeated again and again – sometimes they're not – and sometimes these gestures unfold in the larger musical moments. To contrast this, I was wondering how saturation can balance out decay, so there are moments where notes clash on top of one another. All of this is combined with an interest in non sequitur and how subconscious connections can be perceived in a work of art; if I think about how sections could be entirely separate from one another conceptually and in time, but I still place them together in a linear experience of a musical composition, how much of their relationship is “real” and how much of it is either implied or forced?

Emotionally: How can I disappear into the distance? How can I fade away? Or: how can we move together? How can two persons connect and recede and then come back together?

Perhaps I never found an answer to any of this.

Gesture: it is motion.

I don’t entirely remember what was going on when I wrote this piece, but I do remember tell Jack Yarbrough I wanted to write a big piano piece - he said “go for it.”