Piano Quintet

Note

The seed of the Piano Quintet is a four-note figure stolen from some canonic passage­work in Schu­man­n’s Op. 12 Fantasi­estücke (no. 6, “Fabel”) which I stretch out into a melody and set in a prola­tion canon (indi­vid­ual voices playing that melody at differ­ent speeds). After getting stuck on a partic­u­larly unre­solv­able chord, “Boulder Pushing” reworks that sequence into a churning mass of tremolos that descend inex­orably, gath­er­ing speed all the while. 

The piano drops out for the center of the piece (marked “Tenera­mente” or tenderly), a repeated chorale revolv­ing around a B major pole, pushing grad­u­ally outward in volume and complex­ity with each iteration. 

“Lentic­u­lar Postcard” treats the opening canon play­fully, the instru­ments over­lap­ping in groups of three, four, five, and seven, result­ing in a slippery texture which seems to shift depend­ing on one’s focus. The music of “Pyramid Scheme” looks like actual peaks and valleys on the page, a visual and sonic map inter­spersed with gentle recol­lec­tions of previous movements.

So there’s also a struc­tural rela­tion­ship between my piece and Schumann, in addition to the thematic one, in the form of a thought exper­i­ment: what if, instead of writing his quintet in monu­men­tal, tradi­tional forms, Schumann had written in the mode of his piano sets (like Kreis­le­ri­ana or Carnaval)—as a single, large-scale form constructed out of several simpler ones?

Piano Quintet was written for pianist Jonathan Biss and the Elias Quartet.

With the Elias Quartet and Jonathan Biss at Zankel Hall.