Preludes: Book II
For Solo Piano (No. 10-18) (2014-20)
Duration: c. 18 mins
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Playlist of Score Videos (includes all but No. 11 and 18)
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This is the second book of an open-ended set of preludes (following Book I) that I have no intention of ever completing—I hope to keep adding to the set for the rest of my life Each prelude is short, between 30 seconds and 4 minutes, and explores a single musical idea. The stylistic range of these preludes are extremely wide, and I hope that when taken as a whole they give a sense of my varied interests and sides as a composer. The preludes can be performed in any combination and in any order, the numbering is simply based on order of completion and does not suggest an ideal order for performance.
Prelude No. 10 (For Ken Girard) - 2014
Prelude No. 10 is an homage to my first composition teacher, Ken Girard, and is influenced by his own music. This prelude was composed in its entirety in a single day in November 2014.
Premiered April 20, 2016 by Allen Shawn at Bennington College, Bennington, VT, USA.
Prelude No. 11 (Pinball) - 2014
Prelude No. 11 for piano was written in November and December 2014. Like a game of pinball, the music darts up and down through different scales and “bounces off” certain unpredictable sustained notes. Later on, the single “ball” splits into two that then “bounce” in mirror images of each other.
Not yet premiered.
Prelude No. 12 (88 Keys) - 2015
Prelude No. 12 for piano was written in September and October 2015. The piece is the result of a challenge from a fellow composer to write a piece for piano that uses all 88 keys of the piano exactly once each.
Premiered October 10, 2018 by Kevin Wang at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY, USA.
Prelude No. 13 (Waves) - 2015
Prelude No. 13 for piano was written in late 2015 and takes some inspiration from Bach's C major prelude from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier and Chopin's Etude in C minor Opus 25 No. 12 ("Ocean").
Premiered October 10, 2018 by Kevin Wang at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY, USA.
Prelude No. 14 (Berceuse) - 2017
Prelude No. 14 for piano was begun in late 2016 and completed in late January of 2017. It is a berceuse (lullaby) featuring a gentle “rocking” of parallel 4ths and 5ths.
Premiered April 29, 2018 by the composer at the Pilgrim Congregational Church, Southborough, MA, USA.
Prelude No. 15 (Liquid) - 2009
Prelude No. 15 for piano was begun in late 2016 and completed in late January of 2017. It features a rapid figure in the middle of the piano with a melody above (and later below) that has to be played with alternating hands, not unlike Lizst's “Un Sospiro” Etude.
Premiered September 24, 2020 by Nathan Cheung at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY, USA.
Prelude No. 16 (Scurrying) - 2019
Prelude No. 16 for piano was completed in November 2019. It is based upon a rapid ostinato figure in one hand contrasted by erratic major and minor triads in the other. Overall, the texture created seems to me to be reminiscent to some of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano.
Premiered September 24, 2020 by Nathan Cheung at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY, USA.
Prelude No. 18 (On the Day of Penderecki’s Death) - 2020
Prelude No. 18 for piano was composed, except for a few small details, on day the great Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki passed away at the end of March 2020. It was written during the COVID-19 epidemic of 2020 and as part of the Eastman School of Music Composition Department’s “Tiny Pieces Project” for 30-second works to be performed by whatever performers and instruments we had access to during quarantine. While the idea for the piece was not inspired by Penderecki’s music and composing began just before hearing the news of his passing, the final chord, an Eb major triad, is a little tribute to the great composer, ending a dissonant/non-tonal work with a blazing major triad like he did in such pieces as Polymorphia and Symphony No. 7.
Not yet premiered.
Prelude No. 17 (For the Left Hand) - 2019
Prelude No. 17 (For the Left Hand) for piano was composed during a two-week stretch of November 2019. I was inspired by left-hand-only piano works of the past, by composers such as Godowsky, Brahms, and Ravel, to challenge myself to write a work that is playable by this hand only. The result is a gentle work where the hand must juggle up to four different voices at once across the entire range of the instrument.
Premiered August 10, 2020 by Maria Marchant at Blüthner Piano Centre,, London, UK.
What People are Saying
“As the most here - fascinating Etude”
“Random noise composed with pseudoscientific principles.”
“I love how this piece manages to both develop and retain a feeling of harmonic status quo, as if everything new is just added on top of something unchanging making the piece very organic.”