98 minutes, 30 seconds
2007

Written for Marti Epstein, this solo piano work is perhaps both the fullest and most concise expression of the musical concerns I’ve been engaged with since approximately 2004—concise: not as in “brief,” but as in “with nothing added.” Significant in scope but unassuming in execution, the piece is an extended exercise in placement—the kind of approach a painter has in mind when they say “just that, just there.”

In creating any musical environment, a composer begins to navigate certain sensitivities. This dynamic is, possibly, magnified when that environment is as austere as this one. At a certain point, the idea of doing anything remotely new or different can begin to feel oppressive, even impossible—almost violent. And yet, listening and responding, things happen. The goal, the task, is for the right thing to happen at the right time; and when that effort is not regulated by any particular exterior consideration (rhetorical or narratological, for example), there is a certain starkness to the procedure. On the one hand, none of it means anything, so there’s potential comfort in that. On the other hand, there’s that much more obligation for it to be something. In the end, it turns out that what it “is,” and whether or not it hangs together, depends more on the listener than anything else.