PRELUDES AND SERENADES — New Music for Piano
Friday, October 1, 2021 – Timucua Arts Foundation
2000 South Summerlin, Orlando, FL 32806.
at 7:00 PM and 8:30 PM
Tickets $20/$10 students, veterans, Timucua & CFCF members
Pianists Will Daniels, Rose Grace, and Barry Snyder perform a striking and stimulating program of new music by local composers.
Join us for the Central Florida Composers’ Forum’s fall concert, which will present new music for piano by local composers. Pianists Will Daniels, Rose Grace, and Barry Snyder perform a striking and stimulating program of music by ChanJi Kim, Keith Lay, Troy Gifford, Stan Cording, Charlie Griffin, Jamie Wehr, Erik Branch, and Alex Burtzos.
There are two performances of this program, one at 7 PM and one at 8:30 PM.
Tickets available at:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/preludes-and-serenades-new-music-for-piano-in-person-tickets-166806656199 (to attend in person)
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/preludes-and-serenades-new-music-for-piano-live-stream-tickets-169003145959 (for the livestream)
Phase Variations is a five-movement set of variations for solo piano that uses as its theme Steve Reich’s classic and seminal 1967 minimalist masterpiece for two pianos, Piano Phase. This was Reich’s experiment with replicating a bug/feature of tape recorders whereby slight differences in the play speed mechanisms between two machines would incrementally create phasing between them over time. The germinal material of Reich’s Piano Phase is a stark twelve-note motive that, in the original, is played in unison rhythm by two pianists that are then asked to phase apart just like two tape recorders would do. This is “process” music at its finest.
In Phase Variations, the Reich theme emerges by the end of the first variation. Each subsequent variation dresses the theme in different ways, as variations do, and ends with a process-derived variation of my own. The finale, which follows the fourth variation without break, is a toccata whose rhythmic patterning is based on the famous Fibonacci sequence. This is a growth pattern seen in nature based on a series in which each number is the sum of the previous two numbers.