The Elided Second Degree
Many years ago I performed Rachmaninoff’s Etude-Tableau op. 39/5, and it remains one of my favorite works by the composer.
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The Hazards of Duke
I long believed that the program from my senior recital in college was lost, but I found a copy about
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Is 10,000 Hours Enough?
“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution.” — Aristotle
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The Modest Beginning
In the early 1980s, after I took up composition and needed a way to present my music to others, I
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Waxing Rhapsodic within Tonality
My Rhapsody for Woodwinds and Piano is harmonically adventurous in places, even flirting with exoticisms such as octatonic, but the
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Structure of the Nine Preludes
The preludes in my set of Nine Preludes for Piano Solo can be played independently, but in some ways the
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The Composer and the Performer
Sergei Rachmaninoff is widely recognized as one of the finest of all pianists, with technical and interpretative powers of the
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Prelude No. 6: Unity within Diversity
The human mind thrives on perceiving unity in the midst of diversity, and that perception is at the core of
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The “Arch”-itecture of a Rhapsody
One might expect a “rhapsody” to be a sprawling affair in which new ideas are invented in the enthusiasm of
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The Amadeus Myth
The popular film Amadeus, based on a stage play of the same name, depicts Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart from the vantage
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I Have a Star!
“Midway through life’s journey,” writes Dante at the beginning of the Inferno, “I found myself in a dark wood.” The
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Nine Preludes: The Pattern Revealed
Composers of preludes frequently present them in a structured key sequence. The preludes and fugues in Book I of Bach’s
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Poetic Endings: The Major-Major Seventh Chord
At the end of a piece, sometimes we seek something more expressive than a simple tonic triad. Several of my
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Meditation: The Old within the New
The human brain delights in recognizing the familiar in new guises. In music, motives and themes are constantly transformed into
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Romanticism and the Enlightenment
The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, was one of the greatest highlights of the period in Western
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