DESCRIPTION:
Joshua Sawicki- piano

This piece was commissioned by Kimberly and Ralph Graham in celebration of the 5 year anniversary of her company Layer Cake Creative. I wanted the piece to be at times virtuosic, other times melodic and pianistic, awhile incorporating the aggressiveness and quick genre changes that have become signature in my work.
The opening section is in two parts. The loud and fast first section uses sets derived from important dates in the commissioner’s life (birthdays, formation of Layer Cake, the date their Steinway piano was built) to create synthetic scales and rhythmic patterns. This section closes with a series of violent stabs that exploit the range of the piano, and is then contrasted with a gentle descending series of chords, also made from the same pitch content. These descending chords broaden to a standstill and introduce a Hildegard von Bingen melody, O Pastor Animarum, asking that we be released from our miseries and frailties. Hildegard’s music was chosen as she is a favorite of the commissioner. This particular melody was chosen for its shape and lyrical content.
The middle section because a series of layered ideas and a pseudo theme and variations around this Hildegard melody. There is a distant ghost-like echo that follows each stanza of the melody and appears through the rest of the piece. There is an uneven groove in the left hand that modulates metrically throughout the middle section. A shifting phase minimalist idea appears, at first gradually, and then more fully after the violent stabs return to mark the middle of the piece. The descending chords from the opening sections also reappear in a variety of forms through the middle section and lead us to the closing cadenza.
The cadenza uses modified scalar and harmonic material from the opening and closes with the most violent set of stabs. This is followed by a more introspective statement of a second Hildegard melody, Sed Diabolus. “But the Devil mocked it in his envy by which he left no work of God untouched.” I consider the creative process to be spiritual and often feel that there is something mocking me, or laughing at my efforts, as I try to make abstract ideas into something concrete.
The echoes reappear one more time to close out the piece and a fade out.
Aside from the two Hildegard melodies subliminal references were made to Berio, Xenakis, Copland, Carter and Debussy.
I would like to thank Kimberly and Ralph for their support of my creativity and of the Playground.