Composer’s Note:

I showed up to college with a motley score collection. I was lucky enough to get some piano lessons in early childhood, though they abruptly ended when I was eight. So, along with the volumes of Czerny, Hanon, Clementi sonatinas, Mozart sonatas, and Bach folios that I was prescribed by Takano Nakamura, the suitcase I unpacked also contained Bartks sixth volume of Mikrokosmos; Bergs Piano Sonata; the second volume of a sight-reading series entitled A Dozen a Day; the rst volume of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book; a songbook of selections from Les Misrables; the piano-vocal scores to Youre a Good Man Charlie Brown, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and The Cradle Will Rock; and a (very) unauthorized copy of version three of The Real Book. Thanks to Borders, I also had scores of Stravinskys Firebird and The Rite of Spring, Debussys String Quartet, Ravels String Quartet, and John Coriglianos rst symphony. I had a few discs of the Ligeti and Penderecki works that appeared in Kubricks lms, a CD of Jennifer Higdons Cityscape and Concerto for Orchestra, and one containing a sampler of the Mannes composition faculty at the time: Robert Cuckson, Leo Edwards, Keith Fitch, David Loeb, and David Tcimpidis. In 2004, all of this music was colliding in my mind with what I had best under my hands: charts by Mingus, Coltrane, Miles, Duke, and the rest of the best.

After my rst lesson, Keith sent me down to Lincoln Square to purchase scores of Messiaens Quatour pour la n du Temps and Ligetis rst book of tudes but at Mannes, we all got the three Bs: Bach, Bartk, and Bill Evans. (Also a lot of Bona.) We played The Beatles, Billie Holliday, and Bjrk after class and in Fred Fehleisens. Downtown, I heard the rest of the alphabet from Adams to Zorn. Uptown, they gave me more Bs: Britten, Boulez, and one in Orchestration. I deserved that one: I wrote a very unplayable string quartet as an undergraduate and several more since! Aaron Travers would teach me how to orchestrate later, but Keith was the one who rst guided my ear toward more delicate nuances possible in line and form.

Processing my teachers advice while considering Bill Wattersons economy of line, shade, and proportion, these four preludes (or panels) are the cruder inkings of a rambunctious truant working out these musical properties. The improvisational comfort zones to which I still return are explored here: mixed meters from folk traditions and already-fused genres, combinatorial and prolongational games abandoned in progress, polytonal noodling, and cascading deformed quartal sonorities.