of the lake Recording

I am happy to announce the release of my first single, the piano etude … of the lake II. Recorded by the pianist Geoffrey Burleson at the Cleveland Composer’s Recording Institute, it is now available for download on iTunes.

The recording was made possible by the grant from St. Xavier University and support from Ms. Nancy Joyce of Chicago.

As a sequel to an earlier piano piece, …of the lake I, this work also continues to explore the concept of a étude from the perspective of both performance and composition. The pianistic technique and compositional design in … of the lake II is structured around the notion of a constantly changing appearance of musical harmony, rhythm, texture, and piano resonance. The piece resembles the surface of a lake or sea that gradually transforms itself by arriving to the shore: as the morphing of the water’s waves embraces a physical constraint imposed by the shore, sand, and stone, the music of this piano work finds meaning in a gradual transformation of wave-like musical gestures and melodic fragments within a clearly predefined tonal and metric palette. This ongoing series of piano etudes is inspired by Lake Michigan and my neighborhood of Rogers Park in Chicago.

While composing the piece, I was interested in capturing the wave-like perceptual attractions between different pitches, causing the listener to establish very clear melodic and metric expectations and grouping schemas. The result is an emotional plethora of evolving melodic lines and more or less fulfilled anticipations of their growth and decay.

Recorded at Cleveland State University; David Yost, recording engineer.