Music for Piano
Toccata
True to the spirit of the style, this virtuosic work is built upon a variety of techniques and ways that pianists touch the keyboard (toccare - Itailan “to touch”). It starts with a tonally ambiguous blur between Eb and D that works through the whole composition as the player moves throughout the keyboard. This work will challenge you engage the full range of the instrument in pitch, dynamics, rhythm, and texture.
Sonatina
A companion work to the Toccata, this work features a bright and modernist-tinged opening that anchors a straightforward short sonata structure. The music contrasts lyric and staccato playing and although merry and light to start contains passages of greater complexity and contrapuntal layering.
Three Rags -
This collection grew from a single piece that I composed for a relative, the late Dr. James Peterson who played banjo and toured with a ragtime band when he was young. The first work, Jimmy's Shimmy, was a nod to his love of ragtime style and as a pianist the only right place to begin such an enterprise was the wonderful music of Scott Joplin. His inventive treatment of the newly emerging style of ragtime helped bring a distinctive american voice to the tradition of virtuosic piano playing that had developed in Europe. I have attempted to incorporate a wide variety of the rhythmic and pianistic figurations that appear throughout his work, although this in by no means an exhaustive gathering of all of Mr. Joplin's creativity.
Jimmy’s Shimmy
Hard Luck
III. Modern Times