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
Modern Times
Piano Sonata in g-minor
Composed in 2005 and dedicated to pianist Benjamin Harding, this sonata is symphonic in its conception and scale. It frequently relies on many layers of touch to render the fore-, middle-, and background layers that make this work resonant and complex. It is a demanding work that dazzles in it shimmering and layered epic narratives
Allegro - The opening movement has a bold chordal proclamation that sets the restless first movement into motion with a contrasting syncopated melodic second theme. The first movement maintains a tense energy throughout even as it quietly dissipates with a broken statement of the second theme.
Psalm - This is a musical mosaic that evokes the many sensations with the book of Psalms from reverence to wonder to rage. The movement wordlessly prays through the many emotions that humasn experience while always coming back to the opening prayer of suplication.
Toccata - This movement is a tour-de-force of pianism that builds on the various techniques throughout to focus on how a player can approach the many subtle nuances of velocity and duration in the context of fast and slow music to create an orchestral fabric of layers and voices. After a short introduction, the music begins with a constantly surging figure in the left hand that appears in each of the subsequent musical areas. The challenge for the pianist of repeated notes become the greater as they become a contrapuntal line threaded throughout richly textured second and third theme areas.
Tintinnabulations of Joy
This piece is a festive work for one piano, four-hands, that starts with the brilliant twinkling of bells to harken in Christmas. It features quotation of “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” in dramatic and coloful harmonization. This piece playfully works between the two players at a single keyboard and is a show piece that will delight listeners especially during the holiday season.
