Hommages for Piano, Book 1
for piano solo
duration: 10 minutes
partly commissioned by Melissa Hoag
Hommage a Kurosawa premiered by Leonard Mark Lewis on May 5th, 2000 in Jessen Auditorium in Austin, Texas. The Hommages to Zappa, Kaku and Kushner were premiered by Melissa Hoag on November 5th, 2004 in Ford Hall on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The Hommage a Mandy Morris was premiered in Auer Hall, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana on March 1st, 2006 by Kaoru Yamamura.
Hommages for Piano is an on-going project of very short, concise character pieces in hommage to various people that have inspired me over the years. These pieces can be performed as a complete suite, individually, or in any combination.
Hommage a Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) was my first attempt at writing serial music. I wanted to write something that was not typical of the 12-tone style, and I think I succeeded with this work. The short piece is in hommage to the late Japanese filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa. The delicacy, as well as the highly structured nature of the pitch material reflect how I feel about Kurosawa's films. The piece is also a mirror of itself – in other words – the second half of the piece is a mirror image of the first half. I felt this tied in with Kurosawa's story telling.
Hommage a Tony Kushner (b. 1956) – In 1994 I saw one of the first performances of his highly influential drama Angels In America. Seeing this play live, and in the theater had a huge impact on me. The piece evokes, for me, the sense of troubled romanticism and fractured beauty that I felt when I experienced the play, and the music is heavily inspired by Chopin's "Revolutionary" Etude.
Hommage a Mandy Morris (1980-2002) – Amanda Akers Morris was, put quite simply, my first love. I met her when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas, and I was fascinated by her from the start. She was a very talented singer, but also an artist and poet. She possessed an insatiable curiosity and felt things deeply. Tragically, in 2002 while auditioning in NY for graduate school, she was struck by a vehicle and lost her life. To say that all of this changed me fundamentally as a person would be an understatement. I was confronted by true loss and true grief for the first time in my life, and it would be years before I really fully recovered from it – well, as "fully" as is possible.
At Mandy's funeral, her mother gave me a CD labeled "For our Tony". It was a series of recordings that Mandy had made of songs that she had written. It was just her in a practice room playing piano and singing. Some were complete songs, but others were just fragments of ideas. It was one of these unfinished fragments that I latched onto. I built this Hommage from the fragment of this untitled song.
Hommage a Michio Kaku (b. 1947) In around 1997 I was introduced to Kaku's book Hyperspace. I've always been interested in physics and the theories put forth by theoretical physicists, but I could never be one myself. I'm a big fan of the "Physics book for people who could never be physicists" genre, and Hyperspace was no exception. The theories of less-than-microscopic vibrating strings and multiple dimensions fascinated my imagination, and I devoured every subsequent book that Kaku has written. This Hommage evokes sudden and short movement within "empty" space, and even utilizes an approximation of the B-flat harmonic series, as it was discovered that the note B-flat is actually the fundamental note of the universe (to the delight of brass players everywhere).
Hommage a Frank Zappa (1940-1993) is a fast and furious two-part invention inspired by rhythms and motives from Zappa's song Inca Roads.