American Piano Series Composers
Jennifer Margaret Barker's Moana was inspired by the streams, rivers, waterfalls, lakes and oceans of southeast Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. The title means ocean, sea, large lake in Maori.
Kent Holliday's Toccata Inquieta (Sp. restless) is a toccata-like composition featuring fleeting scale and arpeggio passages, changing meters, and rapidly repeated notes. It explores a wide variety in keyboard range and attempts to demonstrate the virtuosic elements of the traditional keyboard toccata.
Mark Hagerty's two movements from Clavier (Book Two) on this concert are Capriccio, a perpetual motion study where the theme is pulled apart and put back together, and Aria, which features an elaborate melody, a response to certain philosophical keyboard movements in Bach.
Christopher Cook's Dreamscape is a prelude inspired by a quote from Hyperion, a poem by John Keats:
As when, upon a tranced summer-night,
Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir
--John Keats
Byron Petty's Extractions consist of four works. Extraction no. 1 opens with an octatonic scale (alternating half and whole steps) which is developed throughout the first movement. The mood begins quietly, builds with upward motion then ends quietly – as if in the distance.
American Piano Series Volume 2
American Piano Series Volume 3
Scott Brickman's Sonata is cast in a traditional four-movement mold and draws on a continued interest in merging Western art and popular music. The pitch material is derived from 12-tone rows whose initial hexachords are subsets of the octatonic scale. There are pop music references, especially in the rhythmic vocabulary, also in the textures and chord voicings, which acknowledge the idiomatic repertoire of the piano in the 20th century.
Ssu-Yu Huang's Yearning draws on the poem by Wang Wei (c.740 AD) “In southern lands the red bean tree grows. It sprouts when the vernal breeze blows. Pick the red beans with your hands filled. Your yearning for love will be fulfilled.” The red beans elicit nostalgic thoughts and yearning for friends far away. Structured on the basis of fifth intervals, the music proceeds with variations on the inversions.
Snow on the River draws on the poem “Not a Bird in a Thousand Hills” by Liu Zong-Yuan (c.805 AD) for its inspiration: “Not a soul on ten thousand trails. An old man on a raft in straw quilts – Fishes alone with snowy chills.” The scene of a solitary fisherman evinces a mood of loneliness. Prolonged notes on the left hand describe the steadily flowing river; Scattered short notes on the right hand represent flying snowflakes. With an improvisational form, Lento and Allegro sections interweave, with a Coda of simplistic resonances to express the fisherman's perseverance.
Francis Kayali's Ten Impromptus were composed in the summer of 2015. The waltz in Impromptu No. 3 is contrasted with the fanfare of a radiant and summery middle-section. A parable on time, Impromptu No. 4 quotes from the Westminster Quarters. Impromptus No. 8 is a playful atonal humoresque. Impromptu No. 10 provides a buoyant, virtuosic ending for the set: in the spirit of a Schumann grand finale, the music stays in continuous motion through various landscapes before climaxing in a thunderous valedictory gesture.
The melodic and harmonic material featured in Keith Kramer's Sogni (“Dreams”) is based on the set (0,2,3,4,5,7), also referred to as the B all-combinatorial hexachord. The “dreams” are expressed in with facets of intensity and emotion throughout the composition, from gentle and flowing to intense and articulate.
Margaret McAllister's "Lila" was commissioned by Lukas Foss for the Festival of the Hamptons. Lila (the creative play of soul) is written in the spirit of summer, the energy and playfulness of summers present coupled with sweet memories and tender nostalgia of summers past. Dedicated to Lukas Foss, student and friend of Aaron Copland, the musical language of Lila is written to echo the spirit of that body of classical music identified as the American style.
American Piano Series Volume 4
The Sonata by Ingrid Arauco is in four movements, with the first movement establishing a fundamental harmonic tension between two identical chord structures positioned a half-step apart, which introduced and developed at the outset, create friction and energy. The friction is never truly resolved in favor of either chord; rather, these sonorities are balanced in various ways. The momentum generated by the first movement is played out first as a quick, thinly-drawn scherzo, then as a slow, lyrical set of variations, and finally as a fugue, in which variants of the two opening harmonies of the work appear linearly and continue jostling for dominance, though in a generally more light-hearted manner than at the beginning of the piece. The entire sonata is approximately nineteen minutes in duration.
12 Preludes by Timothy Melbinger
Incantation by Kent Holliday
I wrote Twelve Preludes for piano throughout the first half of 2011 at my home in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. I played the premiere at Penn State Altoona later that year. The pieces are short – it lasts 24 minutes total, although movements may be excerpted for performance. The title reflects my models, Chopin, Debussy and Martino. I kept a running list of descriptions of the music I was writing so I would avoid repetition and keep things fresh. Most of the movements explore one mood. The music is a little more transparent than I had been writing for several years before, and the textures somewhat lighter, as I had hoped to say more with less. The death of Milton Babbitt while writing prompted me to write a movement (#7) in his memory using his pitch organization ideas.
American Piano Series Volume 5
Mixed Motives (2017) was first performed as an improvised piano solo in order to extend a concert that the composer had organized as Director of Wind Activities at Santa Barbara City College in California. I decided to improvise the solo in part to make the concert longer since another chamber group planned for the evening were unable to present their music. The title is a play on words since it represents the content of the work while also referencing the unique circumstance for its creation. The piece itself consists of short musical figures and motives that are juxtaposed with each other in a minimalistic style. The fully realized written composition was not completed until the summer of 2017.
Gig Harbor, Six LIttle Piano Pieces by Robert Fleisher
Six Preludes by William Neil
Sonata by Jonathan Newmark
Incantations from the Popol Vuh (Holliday) draws on the legendary history of the creation of the world - The Popol Vuh, or Mayan Council Book, which relates the daily life of the Maya in their natural surroundings and the underworld journey that awaits them in death. The text abounds in fables involving animals, demons, and feats of magic. In this composition, the composer attempted to suggest the titanic struggles of the Hero Twins, Xblanque and Hunapu as they out-trick and wrestle with the forces of evil. The three worlds, Lower, Middle, and Upper are represented by corresponding registers of the keyboard, with the twins ascending at the end to become the sun and the moon.
Gig Harbor (2010) a retirement gift for my NIU colleague Harold Kafer and his wife Cecelia, is titled for the lovely Pacific Northwest town they now call home. Melodic and harmonic content derives from the names Cecelia, Harold, Kafer, DeKalb, and Gig Harbor. The closing quotation from Debussy’s La Mer combines two pentatonic subsets: the “DeKalb” motive in the bass, answered by the “Harold” motive mentioned above. The Six Little Piano Pieces were composed under the influence of Schoenberg’s Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 forMartin Jones, mostly in 2018. (Each piece here references one of Schoenberg’s.) No. 1 has a new middle section derived from the opening phrase and No. 2 begins with a brief gesture from pieces in Op. 19. Much of no. 1 and most of no. 6 date from the early 1970s. No. 3 comprises multiple encryptions of the name ‘Martin Jones.’ No. 4 combines material from a mass Jones composed as a student and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. No. 5 recalls a familiar tune known as “Westminster Chimes.” (An interior phrase recalls another Schoenberg solo piano work.) No. 6 is largely unchanged. In recognition of Schoenberg’s lifelong triskaideka-phobia, this movement’s 13 measures served as a model for each piece in the set.
Six Preludes (2018) present interpretive challenges for the pianist and evoke diverse emotional responses from the listener. “I was inspired by the improvisatory nature of the short pieces that were common in the Baroque era and reached a pinnacle in the Romantic era. Each of these pieces dramatically thread rhythmic and melodic motifs into a tapestry of sound, each with its own unique character.”
The Piano Sonata (2014) (Newmark) “began as an essay in sonata form after I had not written anything in this form in many years. The sonata form movement became the first of four. The other three movements all derive from motives in the first.” The first movement, orchestrated, received its premiere as a stand-alone overture from the Trinity Chamber Orchestra of Washington, DC in Bethesda, Maryland in June 2015.
Five Misappropriations by Timothy Reed