Winter Portraits

(piano)

Program Notes

            Winter Portraits began as a composition exercise in a doctoral composition lesson with the incredible Dr. Veronika Krausas. She challenged me to step outside of the safe structures of tonality and explore the craft of composition itself. I can never place the concept of text far from my work, so I took as my inspiration a Ted Kooser poem, entitled “Skater.” From there, three movements for solo piano, using different atonal techniques, was born. Movement I uses a tone row, though not quite strictly, to explore texture, rhythm, timbre, tempo, and dynamics. Movement II employs a different strategy, where each pitch initially sounds the number of times as its pitch number. For example, B-flat sounds ten times, G sounds seven times, and C does not sound at all. It then develops these motifs in a variety of ways. Movement III makes use of freely atonal cells, though encompassing the twelve-tone scale. The second half of Movement III is an exact retrograde of the first half, save for dynamics.

Winter Portraits [PDF]

Skater

She was all in black but for a yellow pony tail
that trailed from her cap, and bright blue gloves
that she held out wide, the feathery fingers spread,
as surely she stepped, click-clack, onto the frozen
top of the world. And there, with a clatter of blades,
she began to braid a loose path that broadened
into a meadow of curls. Across the ice she swooped
and then turned back and, halfway, bent her legs
and leapt into the air the way a crane leaps, blue gloves
lifting her lightly, and turned a snappy half-turn
there in the wind before coming down, arms wide,
skating backward right out of that moment, smiling back
at the woman she'd been just an instant before.

--"Skater" by Ted Kooser (b. 1939)
2004, from Delights & Shadows, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA