Stone Path

During the time I was writing this piece, I was also creating a path of stepping stones in the yard just outside from the piano. It was a meticulous process: digging each stone’s spot, filling and compacting and laying and leveling and re-leveling and re-straightening…and then walking the path thus far, listening to my feet to tell me where the next stone should go.

I wrote the opening bars of this music in the same way: one note at a time, looking for where each next fingerfall should land. Like the stone path, these painstaking discrete steps produced a continuous, flowing curve. And like the stone path, it is now easy to walk that curve quickly, inattentively. In the yard, I try to remind myself of the weight of the stone under each step; I hope players will approach the opening notes in the same spirit.

This short piece’s long curve is a series of increasing orbits: the form is A AB ABC A. Each orbit takes the music back it where began — the same notes — but each leads to a different pedal tone in the bass that recolors the music completely. The almost-baroque tonal clarity of the opening becomes an ambiguous modernist suspension. Our journeys change us.