Parallel Futures

With equal and opposite intensity, my long form and miniature works seek a sonic effect that is fully experienced only in live performance, and realized only when the work is finished, in the silence that follows.

My summer is off in a fury of notated composition, taking the form of solo piano miniatures whose contrapuntal and harmonic technique intuitively exhibits, among other things, the nourishment I have received from the music of two composers: Galina Ustvolskaya and Olivier Messiaen. I aim to present this work later this summer.

Meanwhile, the work presented here explores miniature form with just the intensity described above. The exquisite performance was given on my Reinterpretations series as part of the presentation “Parallel Futures” in November 2016 at Spectrum. The following is from the program notes:

​“Music is perhaps most explicitly poetic in a miniature. And one could say such music, in its absolute concentration, most materially transforms the immediate silence around it, making of it a special moment, a unique time of reflection, a potent space in which divergent narratives can be awakened, each, in parallel, suggestive of meanings in the music consequential to the life of a listener.”