My latest album is now available on all streaming platforms. You can find details on the Mystery Cabal site.
My latest release is an album of me (not-a-pianist) not-playing not-a-piano. It includes two of my pieces. Fitful Slumbers (2006) was written for María Fernanda Nieto-Pulido and was premiered at a master with Ursula Oppens. It is a short four-movement work, with each movement representing a different sleep disorder. My Sonatina for Piano (2002) is likely my earliest surviving concert work. I conceived it as a single movement work with sections that would model a multi-movement work in miniature. This is the first time I’ve released a recording of it, and it’s always interesting to revisit something from my compositional past, flaws and all.
Donald Keat’s Piano Sonata (1961) will always hold a special place in my heart. It’s a really spectacular and underperformed piece. It was a piece brought a lot of my fellow composition students to the Lamont School of Music to study with Don. Sometimes, music has a way of bringing friends into our lives.
Bear McCreary’s Battlestar Sonatica is another short single movement work composed for the re-envisioned Battlestar Galactica series. In the show, it is used in a series of scenes in which a character finds himself living in a world in which the repetitive and unvaried environment and routines make time start to seem meaningless. Days flow into weeks or even months. He can’t really remember how long he’s been there, and there seems no hope that it will ever change. There was a point in my life where I listened to this piece almost every day in an effort to shake myself out of a similar feeling. There are two other recordings of this piece available: the original from Season 3 soundtrack from Battlestar Galactica, and the Joohyun Park version from the album of all the piano arrangements. The Park version is faster than the original McCreary version. I liked the idea of a third reading that was slower than the original.
The Sonata (1918-1919) by Charles Tomlinson Griffes came into my life when a dear friend and former bandmate gave me a CD of American Piano Sonatas. The Griffes grabbed my attention immediately. There were sections in which things built to a giant climax, and then a new idea would float up out of the decaying sustain of the previous idea. As I dug deeper, I became intrigued with the complexity of rhythmic gestures play against a fairly regular metric grid.
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