Polycrisis (2024)                                                                             Matt Brown (1978-)

Lament (1981)                                                                                 John Schneider (1950-)

The Blur of Time and Memory (2014)                                        Alexander Elliott Miller (1982-)

Alien Warp Etude (2012)                                                              Isaac Io Schankler (1979-)

Reeded Cottage, 1905 (Knipton, Leicestershire) (2020)        Jonathon Grasse (1961-)

Paths of the Wind (2010)                                                              Bill Alves (1960-)

Mbira (or in Cage with Adams) (2012)                                      Vera Ivanova (1977-)

Toccata from Suite for Microtonal Piano (1978)                     Ben Johnston (1926-2019)

Program Notes

Polycrisis for piano and sampler explores the fragmented and lossy nature of memory, exacerbated by the constant news and noise of a world experiencing multiple simultaneous crises that feed into each other. I created a sampled instrument from bits and pieces of previous piano works of mine, along with a few of my vocal sketches for another piece, all electronically mangled, manipulated, and misremembered in various ways. The bits of memory flash here and there and are sometimes played back obsessively, dwelling on the echoes of a remembered bit of phrase. In writing this piece, I had in mind a correlation between the intrusive and unpredictable characteristics of memory and the feeling of being overwhelmed by a world in which it seems as if everything is going wrong at the same time. I also think about how we rely more and more on technology to remember things for us, both individually and collectively, and how that same technology increasingly magnifies and distorts the past and present.

—Matthew Brown

Lament fulfilled an old aspiration to write music of several parts with tightly chromatic voice- leading and constantly developing thematic structure. It is the tale of two perfect fifths, in search of harmony, and written ‘Pythagorean’ or ‘Ditone’ intonation, which created by tuning a circle of 12 pure fifths Bb-D#. When played in that tuning, the harmonic tensions are exquisitely enhanced, since its major triads produce unusually harsh major thirds, making tonal resolution virtually impossible – except for one delicious anomaly, which closes the piece.

—John Schneider

The Blur of Time and Memory was composed in 2014 for Aron Kallay’s “Beyond 12” series.  The piece itself utilizes a tuning system in which half steps are divided into five equal tempered steps, but selected pitches are removed from the keyboard in segments altogether, allowing the 88 keys to cover a wider range.  This allows for some moments of equal tempered harmony, mixed with various glissando effects on the keyboard.  I feel that those glissando effects, combined with the pedal, created some of the inspiration for the title, where lines between notes are blurred, where the clarity of a chord may begin to melt away and disappear behind a fog.

—Alexander Elliott Miller

Alien Warp Etude is loosely inspired by Chopin’s Etude Op. 25 No. 1. Chopin’s work earned the nickname “Aeolian Harp” from Robert Schumann, who imagined the piece emanating from a wind-powered instrument with various scales “intermingled by the hand of the artist into all sorts of fantastic embellishments.”
In keeping with this idea of overlapping scales, the tuning of this etude borrows elements from two overtone series, separated by the one of my favorite musical intervals: the “neutral” or “androgynous” third, which falls between the major and minor third. I find this interval to be a source of great beauty, ambiguity and tension. Similarly, the etude explores tensions between abstract, mathematical patterns and a flowing, melodic lyricism.

—Isaac Schankler

Reeded Cottage, 1905 (Knipton, Leicestershire) was composed for Aron Kallay in 2019-2020. The piece opens in 22-note/octave shruti, shifts to just intonation, and ends in equal temperament as it conveys a range of gestures, textures, and other thematic material. The contrast-filled work is a fragmented, time-travelling meditation on a 1905 photograph taken in England, the only known image of my father’s father, George Grasse, who immigrated to San Francisco in 1900.

– Jonathon Grasse

Paths of the Wind

This title was suggested by the Vayu Purana, a Hindu text I learned of during a period of study in India. The wind passing over bamboo or the vocal cords is the mythical origin of music in many traditions, and the wind is also the conveyance from the human world to the heavens. The tuning of this work is based on interlocking pathways of numbers, namely two, three, and seven. It was completed in 2010 at the request of pianist Aron Kallay, to whom the work is dedicated.

—Bill Alves

Mbira (or In Cage with Adams) was composed in 2012 for the pianist Aron Kallay, the first performer of the piece. It was inspired by the subtle resonance of the traditional African percussion instrument, mbira, and by the piano music of the two great American composers, two Johns – John Cage and John Adams.
The reference to the instrument mbira is in the use of limited piano range (only treble clef is used in the piece) and selected number of repeated pitches (30 pitches), based on pentatonic scales, and also in microtonal retuning of each of the pitches sounding in the piece (by 5-35 cents).
The piece is meditative in character and uses minimalistic techniques, recycling the same pitches in different order, until it gradually comes to its natural end, like a burning candle.

—Vera Ivanova

Suite for Microtonal Piano (1978) is a suite for specifically microtonally tuned piano(s) by Ben Johnston written in 1977 (see also just intonation). According to Bob Gilmore the piece, “take[s] extended just intonation well beyond the point reached by Harry Partch.”