Prelude, Chorale, ..and a few other things (1985)

Two Pianos – 10 mins.
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Program Note

The musical materials of “Prelude, Chorale, .. and a few other things” (1985) are designed to be sturdy, concrete, clearly profiled. They are non-organic, and larger structures are created not through any growth process, but by reorganizing contexts and collisions. The opening idea of the Prelude, for example, resembles an interstellar oxcart — heavy, a little rusty, and mechanically rumbling along, but appearing with a kind of contextual independence that gives it the transported sense of floating through wormholes in the space-time continuum. The traditional texture of the chorale-prelude has a similar aspect: the insistent quarter-note rhythm and square phrase structure of the chorale tune (in this case, a tritone-outlining tune of the composer’s own devising is surrounded by independent, free-form material.)

The “few other things” appear in two sections, ”Spherical Night Music” and “Toccata Ruvida.” In the “Night Music,” the repeated octaves are shared by both pianos throughout, taking on a different ambience which isolates this sound from the more individualized surface material tossed between the pianos. More tossing and colliding of ideas occurs in the “Toccata,” but in one visceral climactic section cascading scales are riveted in both pianos reinforced in four octaves.