Interior/Exterior Pieces
for solo piano

Work nos. 142, 149, 151, 163, 173, 177, & 187
2019–21

My idea for the first piece of this series was to get away from the rhythmic intricacies of Assemblage and Metamorphic Canon, completed just a couple of months before. I wrote down a passage of descending chords and suddenly saw it as depicting a staircase; this eventually led to an exploration of an entire imaginary home, or several. My memories of the Atlantic coast of France came flooding in, and provided the setting.

I didn't quite manage to rid the music of complicated rhythms the way I wanted. Individual melodies may have a simple regular rhythm here, but the structure of each piece is bristling with symmetries, reflections, and echoes. And in my mind, all of these carry a meaning: a turning of the key, a view from a high window, someone's presence, a memory. These meanings carry from piece to piece.

Each piece may be performed as an individual work, but they also form a whole, which I like to call Interior/Exterior Pieces, like INT. and EXT. indications in screenplays. Taken as such, it's the largest and most important of my piano cycles after Letter Variations. Carson Cooman was the first to perform these works, and you can listen to his performances on Youtube: