City Lights and Other Stories

for piano
2013-18
50 minutes

i.      City Lights 1
ii.     City Lights 2
iii.     City Lights 3
v.    Mémoire
v.     Chaetura
vi.    Berceuse for a Diamond Moon
vii.    Khaen
viii.   For Alin
ix.    Air
x.      Canon
xi.    Blues Nocturne
xii.    Snowflakes
xiii.   River Rouge
xiv.   Letters from a Lost Poet

These fourteen compositions may be performed separately or in any combination and order.

City Lights and Other Stories began in 2013 when I composed the dedication piece For Alin for a young pianist, and Air for solo glockenspiel. Although I was performing frequently on piano, both chamber music and improvisations, I had not composed for the instrument since 2001. So I set out to create a collection of pieces reflecting my personal music experiences—from playing pipe organ, piano, Thai traditional music, and teaching classical and contemporary repertoire—with the added requirement that each piece would be moderated in both difficulty and length in order to be suitable for students who are not yet experienced in modern music. The pieces accrued slowly, in between and among other projects, and reached completion earlier this year. City Lights 1–3 are dedicated to Andrea Violet Lodge, Air to Aaron Michael Butler, and For Alin to Alin Bilsel.

City Lights are portrait pieces inspired by the music of Meredith Monk (i), my days as an improviser (ii), and electronic dance music (iii), and also by the bookstore. Mémoire evokes the music of Jehan Alain, whose music I played as a pipe organist and which had a profound effect on my personal style.

Chaetura is the scientific name of a genus of spectacularly acrobatic birds including the Vaux’s Swift and Chimney Swift. Berceuse for a Diamond Moon is one of the most technically challenging pieces in the collection, employing the pedals of the piano to produce layers of color like a pipe organ. It is based on the same mathematical designs as some of my recent compositions, including the organ solo Construct: for organ. And Khaen emulates the other kind of organ that I play, the free-reed bamboo mouth organ from Laos and Northeast Thailand.

Canon employs contrapuntal techniques common in the Baroque era, including canons with transposition and canons in inversion. Blues Nocturne melds the static voicing and repetitious surface of minimalism with the nocturne genre closely associated with Frédéric Chopin, while the chord progressions are all derived from the blues.

In Snowflakes, each chord is unique in structure and they accumulate as they fall. And River Rouge is named for the Ford River Rouge plant as immortalized by photographer Charles Sheeler and reimagines a futurist fascination with industry and mechanization (as in other recent works of mine, such as Violin Concerto).

The collection closes with Letters from a Lost Poet, a chorale and improvisation reminiscent of Robert Schumann’s closing chorale Der Dichter Spricht from the suite Kinderszenen. There is a hidden quotation of Der Dichter Spricht here, but that quotation is also Schumann’s quotation of Beethoven.

Four selections from City Lights and Other Stories were recorded by pianist Jeffrey Jacob for the CD Contemporary Eclectic Music for the Piano, vol. 19 (New Ariel Recordings, 2021).

Complete set of 14 works, PDF (47 p.)
$30

Purchase movements individually:

i. City Lights 1 PDF (3 p.)
$5

ii. City Lights 2 PDF (3 p.)
$5

iii. City Lights 3 PDF (4 p.)
$7

iv. Mémoire PDF (2 p.)
$3

v. Chaetura PDF (4 p.)
$7

vi. Berceuse for a Diamond Moon PDF (4 p.)
$7

vii. Khaen PDF (4 p.)
$7

viii. For Alin PDF (1 p.)
$3

ix. Air PDF (2 p.)
$5

x. Canon PDF (3 p.)
$5

xi. Blues Nocturne PDF (4 p.)
$7

xii. Snowflakes PDF (2 p.)
$3

xiii. River Rouge 1 PDF (4 p.)
$7

xiv. Letters from a Lost Poet PDF (4 p.)
$7

All scores are published by

Live performance at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla, California