Chronicling at The Keyboard

John McDonald, Composer and Pianist, Associate Professor of Music
Chronicling At The Keyboard: Piano Album 2005

My current focus is a large, ongoing endeavor that I call “Chronicling at the Keyboard,” recital projects that feature my own pieces from piano albums I have compiled each calendar year since 1984 along with works by composers as diverse as Nicholas Strowgers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Toru Takemitsu, Alban Berg, Stefan Wolpe, colleagues such as Robert Carl, Peter Child, David Cleary, Marti Epstein, Yehudi Wyner, and current and former students.

Piano Album 2005 includes nearly sixty individual miniatures ranging in length from thirty seconds to eight minutes. These miniatures, rather than flexing technical muscle, eschew spectacle in favor of posing questions or offering sonic observations through concise pianistic statements. The compositional language is fundamentally dissonant and highly chromatic, yet aims to be no more complex than most lives led, most experiences reported. “Rising dissonance and fierce compression,” words used by Katharine Washburn in 1986 to characterize the last poems of Paul Celan, describe qualities that might apply to the 2005 album leaves*. The 2005 pieces derive particular inspiration from Sri Lankan folk music (“In Kirtanam Meter,” “Pare Pana,” “Todayam, Miserere, Qaddish”), old English keyboard music (“Old English Sketchette After Strowgers,” “Eastman Ave. Point,” “Upon Ormavoyt”), both the tsunami and recent hurricane (“Renewal In Vadimudi Time,” “Appalled”), feelings of alienation (“Don’t Know The Time,” based on a Duke Ellington excerpt, “Monomania In A Cradle Song”), the need to memorialize or celebrate (“Epicede For Robert Creeley,” “Lara Tetractys,” “Epicede For Anthony Cornish,” “Gratulatory,” “Gardner Read His Exequy”), joy in natural impressions (“Province Lands,” “About To Open,” “Gondolet”), unusual and new poetic forms (“Hagino Sedoka,” “Wail In The Form Of A Tyburn,” “Disappointment In Shadorma Form,” “Vigil Mondo”) and more. There is even an album piece for piano and toy piano played simultaneously by one performer (“Several Lunes And A Whitney”), premiered recently at the Extensible Toy Piano Festival at Clark University.

For me, composing and performing have merged into the same impulse with these albums, expressing through the piano (chronicling at the keyboard) what another might in a speech, a poem, an article, or through conversation. “Songs without words,” “tone poems,”  “short stories,” or “remarks” might all serve as accurate descriptions for these album pieces, which I hope are selected by performers from any or all albums much like a singer would select song recital groups from a body of existing repertory or a reader would browse freely through the library for new inspiration.

*from Introduction to Last Poems: Paul Celan, translated by Katharine Washburn and Margaret Guillemin. North Point Press, San Francisco 1986. p. x

Copyright © 2005 John D. McDonald. All rights reserved