"Inner Landscapes" (2009)

for solo piano. Commissioned by Adam Marks .

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See YouTube videos:

Movt. 1: "The Propulsion of Purpose": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3lT7ppewzg
Movt. 2: "Dust from the Rubble of Dreams": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhS1ydOhkEE
Movt. 4: "The Mechanism of Miracles": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2606C7JQNO8

 

PROGRAM NOTES

This work, commissioned by Adam Marks and written for him, is scored for a vocalizing pianist, that is to say a pianist who, while playing the music, also interprets a text, which may or may not require reading, singing, acting, crying, sighing, laughing, and doing whatever indicated in the score.

“Inner Landscapes” took a long time to compose, after an even longer period of gestation, during which I was thinking about what type of work I wanted to write, and what character I would give the text. As it often happens in my work, after many months of reflection, the character, structure, and main musical materials of the piece all came to me in a sudden, clear and almost intuitive way. The text was excerpted and assembled from a wide variety of sources and influences which have been very important to me over the years. Musically, a wide variety of styles and compositional techniques coexist, with lyrical and expressive moments characterized by late-Romantic harmonies slowly transforming and exploding into highly virtuosic dissonant passages, only to implode and extinguish themselves into moving, ethereal sections, leading to deep, meditative silence. Musical materials that have shaped my life since my early childhood and fragmented musical quotes of a heterogeneous nature will emerge hauntingly to the surface of the music, like relics of the past; in Italian I call them “fantasmi della memoria" (memory’s ghosts). The second movement also features graphic notation, in which the performer is asked to improvise on the basis of the graphic symbols in the score.

The work was made possible by the generous contribution of the following donors:
Marie Alpert, Don Arfer, Rose Marie Arons, Mark Bower, Martin Bressler, Anne Brooks, Evangeline Caliandro, Judy Gold, Philip Graziano, George Keyes, Michael Magie, Beppe Manca, Cecelia Marcus, Joe and Sally Mc Intyre, Lisa Mohlo, Warren Moe, Sean Monagle, Silvano Nova, Howard Orlin, Israel Ouval, Maureen Pricci, Franco Salvini, Carl Schachter, Craig Seligman, Jeannette Smith, Frances Smokowski, Evelyn Stierle, and Miriam Tucker. Fractured Atlas provided technical support for the commission.

 

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