Piano: Julia Lin

Heart-Suite was written using two sources of material: one, a conventional twelve-tone row, treated with standard twelve-tone techniques; and the other a twelve-note melody that is not treated serially. The latter melody is a musical cipher, using the ancient practice of soggetto cavatto to transform, or encode, letters of a name into musical notes.

The first movement, “Heart-Beat,” was actually written second. The twelve-tone material is given to the left hand, pounding out a lively march-like beat, while the cipher melody sings above it, sometimes captive to its rhythm and sometimes breaking free.

“Heart-Sick” is a morose lament with qualities of a chaconne, a Baroque form that makes use of a repeated bass line. In this movement, the “repeated” line is actually variants of the twelve-tone row, but always starting on the same pitch, G. Meanwhile, the cipher melody soliloquizes in a recitative-like fashion.

“Heart-Race” is a lively moto perpetuo, constantly moving—until it’s interrupted. The interruptions are made from the cipher melody, which is also heard as a distant melody undergirding the machine-like pace of the upper line. The moving lines are made from Stravinskian rotations of the row’s two halves, subjected to various injuries.

The final movement, “Heart-Song,” abandons the twelve-tone row and is a free, rhapsodic love-song, my version of a Schumann or Schubert Lied, filtered through Stravinsky, Debussy, John Adams, Thelonious Monk, and all the other composers and musicians who occupy and inform my mental soundscape. The material in this movement derives mainly from the intervals present in the cipher melody, and is the movement most connected to the dedicatee in my perception.

Unlike most of my works, this piece seemed to flow from me in a spate of inspiration. The concept lingered for a while as it took shape, but once the work was begun in earnest it was finished in less than a week. This piece is dedicated, with love and admiration, to Kamela Ann Caschette.

Heart-Suite - IV: Heart-Song

Heart-Suite - III: Heart-Race

Heart-Suite - II: Heart-Sick

Heart-Suite - I: Heart-Beat

The impetus for this work was a visual image—clouds passing in front of the moon on a relatively clear night. I was immediately struck with a corresponding aural image—a melody, radiant and ever-changing, obscured by shifting and evanescent textures which overlap and pass like the clouds, alternately obscuring and revealing the ever-present melody.

Musically, I drew inspiration from the works of Harrison Birtwistle, especially his practice of creating monodies and “musical mechanisms.” There are homages to the opening pulsed unison from Silbury Air and the trading solos of Secret Theatre. At the end I borrow from my own work. The “endless melody” that concludes a previous chamber orchestra piece titled One Track Mind becomes one of the clouds, providing a competing melody. Ultimately the “moon” melody from this piece wins out, although the victory is not complete.

The title is borrowed from a poem entitled “Mutability” by Percy Bysse Shelley. The first stanza reads:

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
    		How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever

Clouds That Veil The Midnight Moon

Triple Duel’s instrumentation was inspired by Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat and its opposition of high and low instruments in each category: woodwinds—clarinet and bassoon; brass—trumpet and trombone; and strings—violin and contrabass. I decided to omit the strings and focus on the more forceful winds. I knew I wanted two percussionists, but it didn’t make much sense to pair “high” versus “low”—is a cymbal “higher” or “lower” than, say, a woodblock. I chose to pit “standard” unpitched percussion—the kind one might find in the back of an orchestra or as part of a drum kit—against “found” percussion, the kinds of instruments one can make by taking a drumstick or mallet to scrap or everyday objects. Some of the “found” percussion I used has become standard in new music over the last few decades, while the percussion used in the opening of the piece is of my own devising.

The piece is episodic—a duo of instruments shares a dialogue (contentious or harmonious) while the rest of the band supports them, culminating in a “duo cadenza” that is the apotheosis of the duo’s conflict. The process then starts over again with another duo. First, the high instruments are paired, then the low, and finally the two percussionists duel it out. (I think you can guess where the title comes from.) The final part of the piece consists of everyone coming together to beat out a wild rhythm, accumulating notes until the phrase is whole, at which point the piece comes to a crashing halt.

The cadenzas were inspired by the instrumental soliloquys of Edgard Varèse. Another influence on this piece was the work of Harrison Birtwistle, whose works feature layered ostinatos and extensive, disjunct yet lyrical solos, especially for wind instruments.

This work is dedicated to my advisor and mentor for the past several years, Dr. Robert D. Morris, without whom neither this nor the written portion of my dissertation would ever have been finished!

Triple Duel (MIDI)

“Even as the trees” – John Keats (1795-1821), from Endymion

       […] even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Haunt us till they become a cheering light
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast,
That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast;
They always must be with us, or we die.

Hyperion Songs - I: "Even as the trees"

"Dying Light," like the previous prelude, "Morning Tea," had a direct compositional model: the works of George Crumb. Crumb's inventive and rich techniques often explore the manifold sounds of the piano. "Dying Light" explores Crumb's harmonic and melodic language rather than his interest in the direct control of timbre and sound.

Premiered live by Sean William Calhoun on September 27, 2018, in Hatch Recital Hall at the Eastman School of Music.

Attitudes for Piano No. 5 - Dying Light (2017)

"Morning Tea" took its inspiration from a lovely, elegant work by Luigi Dallapiccola, one of the pieces from his "Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera." Dallapiccola's version of twelve-tone music is quite often delicate and piercingly beautiful, and "Morning Tea" is my attempt to capture that in my own way (which probably leads to the tea being sloshed out of the cup more often than not).

Premiered live by Sean William Calhoun on September 27, 2018, in Hatch Recital Hall at the Eastman School of Music.

Attitudes for Piano No. 4 - Morning Tea (2017)

"Hunt and Peck" poses quite a technical challenge for the pianist. The title refers both to an inefficient style of keyboard typing, as well as my ability at the piano. The uneven rhythm of this piece resembles a much, much faster version of my attempts to play, for example, a slow piano sonata movement of the Classical era. The piece pits similar repeating figures against one another that gradually become rhythmically unhinged from one another. A second idea of tremolando chords interrupts and gradually merges with the first idea, both creating clouds of sonority but in different ways.

Premiered live by Sean William Calhoun on October 18, 2018, in Kilbourn Hall at the Eastman School of Music.

Nick Morandi

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