A dirge for solo piano, made on June 21, 2025.

It is hard to find motivation to describe this work just finished, Erasure, an excerpt of which I share here—the last minute or so of “The Promise of Rhyme,” the last of its three compositions. I am sitting presently with two thoughts, though. First, one does not speak truth to power. Second, I quote my brother Andrei Tarkovsky, who felt as acutely as I the monstrousness of war and, separately, who shared the belief that, in art, a manner of presentation in which “the artist obliges the audience to build the separate parts into a whole, and to think on, further than has been stated, is the only one that puts the audience on a par with the artist in their perception… And indeed from the point of view of mutual respect only that kind of reciprocity is worthy of artistic practice.”

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