Old Songs: 11 Piano Preludes

Written in 2020 for solo piano (45 minutes)

Original Program Note

Old Songs

Some memories

Partially forgotten

Faintly remembered

Thoughts on the Piece

The preludes started as a COVID project, in a way. I’d had the idea of writing a “book” of piano music: I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I had recently fallen in love with Antoine Beuger’s 24 guitar preludes, and I had been speaking with Anthony Donofrio about their book of piano preludes and decided it was something I wanted to give a try with the extra time on my hands.  

These pieces are thematically linked and structured in overlapping cycles – the names and the content of the individual preludes are paired, and the conceptual framework of each type are all linked. This attention to formal detail has everything to do with the idea of a book: a novel, a narrative, a structure, a form, an artifice, etc. I don’t think “concentric rings” or “nested relationships” really make sense here, but there is a pattern and a musical relationship across the whole collection. Some have buried quotations, some have references to my friends, some have references to music from a long time ago, and some are a bit funny (to me).

At the same time, this project came as I was really ramping up the idea of starting Sawyer Editions. Nothing was released yet, but I thought it would make a great project that could start off Sawyer Editions: I knew this would have to be recorded either remotely or by myself, and I thought a collection like this would make a coherent album, and it also would be a bit of a flag-planting for what I wanted Sawyer to be. Ultimately, it ended up being an project that idealized some of my goals with Sawyer Editions: a recording collaboration between myself and Richard P John in Wales, who at that point I had never even spoken to over Zoom (just email and Reddit).

I love these little pieces, and I have a dream of writing more preludes, more “books” and more old songs. At the time of writing this note, more are underway, but that is a topic for a different day…