Loading
The Dedication is my first — and only — piano four hands composition. Its melancholic mood emerges from its minor key (A melodic minor, mode 2), its slow tempo, and, its copious use of space. Pärt’s inspiration is blatant. That’s on purpose.
The title comes from a dedication written in German I found on the inside, front cover of a used book I purchased on the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I only recognized “I love you” (ich liebe dich). It struck me as tragically sad how, at some point, these two people must have been so in love as to provide each other with small gifts representing great emotion, only to be reduced to a $3.00 exchange between strangers on the street.
This composition has been recorded on other occasions with different pianists between 2007 – 2011. Kind and eternal gratitude goes to Terence Boyer and Mari Suzuki, and, of course, Vasu Panicker and Jeremy Chan.
Recorded Sunday, 30 January 2011 at Queens College.
Loading
I had heard that going pizz — as in pizzicato — on a stringed instrument always sounded good. As a student of composition, I wanted to test this theory to the extreme: Go pizz on all the instruments in a string quartet composition for the entire work. During rehearsals, however, Curtis Stewart suggested a small change: Go arco for a section of the work. It was a great suggestion, and you can hear in the recording his interpretation of this idea.
Recorded 18 December 2012, Queens College New Music Group concert, Queens College.
Loading
This piece was written for a composition/orchestration class in the spring of 2011. The limit was 60 seconds; I exceeded it by about 15.
No extended techniques or experimentation with wind quintet instruments in this work, just a quick entry into the interaction of wind instruments using a very traditional Western musical language.
Recorded 18 March 2011, Queens College.