Program notes:

This single movement work contains five distinct sections. While these sections contrast with one another, each flows into the next, allowing the pacing of the music to continue throughout the piece. The cello delivers the primary material much of the time, but the piano cannot be considered simply accompaniment. The role of the piano is intricate, at times delicately commenting on the cello’s music, yet at other times it encourages the cello, almost daringly. In the central moment of the piece, material from the introduction returns. Here the two instruments blend and work together to produce an ascending stream of parallel five-note chords.

This piece is the first that shows the assimilation of my experience as a jazz pianist. Especially in the slow middle section, I create a harmonic vocabulary that borrows much from jazz; yet the chords are treated here as isolated sounds, and they don’t resolve in the traditional way that they might in jazz music.