---

Composer’s Notes

The piano was my first instrument, and I’ve played since I was eight years old. As both a percussion instrument and one that is capable of incredible resonant harmonies, the piano fires my imagination and spawns innumerable possibilities.

The ancient Greek spiritual concept of the “hieros gamos” captures the Janus nature of my inspiration, an overarching principle revealing the ultimate wholeness concealed among pairs of apparent opposites. Literally meaning sacred marriage, the mysterious union of the “hieros gamos” involves a simultaneous moment of creation and dissolution between the self and the other, a coterminous spiritualization of matter, and materialization of spirit. In the language of alchemy, Carl Jung spoke of a “chemical wedding,” where the “yang and yin” of things are purified back into an original unity.

*****

In 2001 I began to focus on harmony and resonance with a short work for piano, The Blackbird whistling / Or just after. In this piece, the lowest octave is held in the sostenuto pedal, allowing those strings to vibrate freely and creating additional sympathetic vibrations when higher pitches are played. I think of this resonance as a kind of aura surrounding the sound.

Pianist Sarah Cahill commissioned and premiered Blackbird for a program dedicated to the memory of composer Ruth Crawford Seeger. Since then, many other pianists have performed it, and I am particularly fond of this version by Oni Buchanan, who created the first recording of this work.

In this large work for piano, I want to show how opposing characteristics and materials ultimately derive from a single source. Two seemingly contradictory properties of the piano are essential. First, the piano is like a huge horizontal harp, with strings under many tons of pressure and capable of incredibly powerful resonance. Second, the piano is essentially a percussion instrument, not a sustaining instrument as many eighteenth and nineteenth-century composers tried to make it. Reconciling these two aspects led me to use the harmonic series and a predominately motoric and continuous percussive texture. The seven etudes principally address the study of harmony. The overtone series (up to the sixteenth partial) and its inverse provide the pitch material. At the same time, I use the map of the keyboard as pillars for the choice of fundamentals in the three anchoring movements: the lowest note, A0 for the first movement, the highest note, C8 for the seventh, and the middle of the keyboard, E4 for the middle movement. The piece’s architecture is derived from this construction, with the first and last movements based upon the lowest and highest pitches, respectively, and the fourth middle movement on the E4. The piano’s eighty-eight keys are further divided into zones of eleven half steps, and these areas are used as secondary relationships throughout the work. Movements two, three, five, and six sharply contrast with the beginning, end, and middle, even though, as with the Hierosgamos, they are all created from the same originating material.

As you can see from the title, playing a round (2008) for two pianos is full of jokes. With lots of musical canons, the two instruments echo melodic symmetries back and forth. The first movement, Nuts and Bolts, serves as a frame and returns in the coda at the end. The second movement, Machinations, speeds along at a breakneck pace like two competing machines. The third movement, Frame Switch, dialogues between an embellished chorale in piano one and a strange artificial scale in piano two. The title refers to a train switching between tracks and going off on unexpected rails. The fourth movement, A note to follow sol, plays on the idea of ringing bells and a sober sort of four and five-part counterpoint.

The last movement swings on a riff initiated by piano two and punctuated by spiky chords in piano one. Lastly, in the coda, the music of the first movement returns, Coming back and playing a round. The recordings of Hierosgamos and Blackbird evolved out of years of working with pianist Oni Buchanan, and I am very grateful for her dedication to this performance. Her recording of the two was done in Hertz Hall, Berkeley. I am also very grateful to Jenny Chai and Piotr Tomasz for their performance and recording of Playing a round at the Oriental Arts Center in Shanghai during my first visit to China.

View all albums>