These three works for two pianos are indigenous American music in the neo-romantic style of the early 21st Century.

15 MP3 Songs
CLASSICAL: Contemporary



Details:
The three works for two pianos on this CD were composed between 2001 and 2003.

The title of SUITE FOR PIANO AND A HALF is a mild joke. Not quite myself late one night, I got the idea to recompose a couple of pieces for solo piano for vibraphone and electric piano. Some days later, I went on to compose a third piece for the combination. Soon thereafter, I came to my senses, decided that the vibraphone/electric piano idea was not quite such a nifty one, after all, and repatriated the two older pieces to their solo piano homeland.

Fine. But the newer piece, Dance, ended up with three staves. The result was that Air and Arabesque can be performed by a solo pianist, but Dance requires the right hand of a second pianist to play the third stave on a second piano. Recently, I recomposed for two pianos a piece for guitar and strings, Idyll, I had dedicated to a dear friend. Since this too ended up with three staves, the PIANO AND A HALF joke was born. I suppose I could just as well have called the music SUITE FOR PIANO TEACHER AND FIRST YEAR
STUDENT.

L.A. SEEN: SEVEN PRELUDES FOR TWO PIANOS is the most recent of the three works on this CD. The source material was fragments I liberated from old file folders and expanded into short pieces meant to suggest reflections on the life that goes on around and within me where I live, in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles. These pieces range from humorous to slightly scary to downright catastrophic -- not unlike the city itself, one might say.

The DANCE SUITE FOR TWO PIANOS is the more ambitious of the works on the CD. Unlike the other two works presented here, this suite was conceived to be entirely non-programmatic. I think of it as an abstract ballet, whether classically oriented or as modern dance -- music for the sake of music, and dance for the sake of dance.