Year composed: 2009
Duration: 25′
Instrumentation: solo piano
Movements:
I. quietly urgent
II. playful
III. periodic, hypnotic, with a regular pulse like a heartbeat
IV. fantastic, improvisatory
V. forceful, punchy
Premiered at the Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland, CA, June 2009. Performed and recorded by the composer on la mar amarga album (Albany Records)
Notes:
When I began the Sylvan Pieces I had been taking long walks in the UC Botanical Gardens. I particularly love the Mather Redwood Grove, and had been spending my afternoons there thinking long and hard about how living processes might be embodied in music. In time, these five etudes gradually took their form like the growth of plants—sending out shoots, branching, always growing, always in creation.
Each movement started as an improvisation. The overall form is in the shape of a spiral, radiating out from the center from the initial C-sharp tone through D, E-flat, E, and F, in an escalating registration cutting across the entire range of the piano. Each has a different composition problem to work through, and as always in my piano music, harmony and resonance are paramount issues.
The first piece is constructed around a small circular scalar fragment; the harmony gradually takes shape in a revolving motion above and below the central melody and builds into large complexes of sonorities. Dealing with issues of phrase and rhythm, the “playful” second, moves in fits of starts and stops with bursts of activity across registers. The third etude beats a periodic heart-motive with a melodic idea winding in and out, repeating over and over in different regions of the piano toward a large climax. The fourth uses tremolos, clusters, and strange modal scales which sweep up and down the keyboard, very free and improvisational. The last is a swinging, punchy little tune, very fast and very tricky, asymmetrical in rhythm, which builds from the bottom of the keyboard to the top.
For me, the piano is my musical “home”, and these particular pieces are very personal in character as compared to my other compositions. After some thought, I settled on the title partly because of its connection to nature, but primarily because I live on Sylvan Avenue in Oakland. The Sylvan Pieces are dedicated to the memory of my piano teacher, the great Mozart and Schubert interpreter, Lili Kraus.