Piano (After D.H. Lawrence)

Composer’s note

Piano (After D.H. Lawrence) was written for a Steinway instrument built in 1909 and currently residing in the instrument collection of the Schubert Club through the generosity of Linda and Jack Hoeschler. This piece is an exploration of its marvelously rich, mellow sound and crystalline clarity. Writing for an older instrument, I wanted to evoke a feeling of nostalgia, of “long ago and far away.” I tried to capture some of the images in the poem of the same name by D.H. Lawrence: “A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of tingling strings” and “In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of the song/ betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong/ to the tinkling piano our guide.”

In its form, the piece progresses from the perpetual motion of everyday life (an

exploration of the technical capabilities of the piano), into the dream-like middle section with its Chopinesque melodic motives and its fragments of a half-remembered piano lesson song, and back into the waking present with a brief flurry of the perpetual motion figures to bring it to an end.