My relationship with the piano began with lessons at age 4. Though I never held any interest in pursuing piano performance as a vocation, and eventually turned to the electric guitar to sate my performative inclinations, the instrument has remained an integral component of my musical persona throughout my life.
It has been my stalwart companion from the early stages of learning to read music and to connect physical action to sound. It later became the key to scrutinizing and personalizing music found out in the wild; a sonic and physical environment in which to improvise and explore my creativity; and, eventually, my principal tool as a composer and musical thinker.
Though I’ve until now composed little for it as a solo instrument, the piano figures prominently in my orchestral and especially in my chamber music. Its extreme register (spanning lower and higher in frequency range than the entire symphony orchestra), its relatively uniform timbral characteristics across its register, its ability to encapsulate a wide range of dynamics, textures, and articulations, its massive sound production, and its capacity to produce complex harmony from the actions of a single operator make the piano, in my mind, the greatest musical instrument humanity has produced.
The Piano Études, an ongoing compositional project, are intended as a playground for me to probe the possibilities of the instrument within the context of my personal musical language. It is a venue in which individual technical and musical problems are explored and workshopped, with the goal of developing a more nuanced compositional command of the instrument for future use in my growing repertoire of solo, chamber, and orchestral music.
Reciprocally, these études also serve as a training ground for pianists interested in performing my music. My proclivity for loud, heavy, aggressive, and virtuosic music – particularly various subgenres of metal – results in performative and interpretive challenges specific to my style. I present this series of works in the hope that pianists will find in them interesting and satisfying challenges unique to the repertoire, as well as something of musical value that can be convincingly woven into solo recital programs.
Organized into books, each set of études features two types of short pieces: an “obstinata”, which explores the more aggressive, metal-oriented elements of my style, and a “fabrica”, which focuses on aspects of sonority and texture.
Book I was conceived as a program or set opener. Its technical and musical focus:
riffing/ostinati, groove shifts, metric modulation, polymeter, stark contrast of articulation, hand crossing, gestural bursts, and line as melody or as propulsive element.
Book II was conceived as a program or set closer. Its technical and musical focus:
wrist/arm repetition (arpeggios, chords, individual notes), stamina at continuous loud dynamics, articulation contrast, voice control within chordal textures, textural separation, and pedal control.
Composed for pianist Jenny Lin and NYC composer collective ICEBERG New Music.
