Altromondo for piano four-hands and assorted items
(2013-15/rev. 2018)
The piano of today, nearly unrecognizable from its earliest keyboard predecessors, is a nearly perfect instrument. After hundreds of years of technological advances, the modern keyboard is resilient, producing a beautifully resonant, uniform sound. My work for ZOFO, Altromondo (Italian for "other world" or "another world") is a piece that works with this "ideal" sounding instrument, and adds a number of other sounds that the piano can make but does not commonly get the opportunity to produce on purpose. These sounds extend from and merge into the additional items that the pianists are required to play. Throughout ten short movements, the piece tinkers with the sounds of "another world," where music operates as debris, coalescing, floating by, snagging on one another, assembling, gathering, dispersing, and eventually receding. Time is not an arrow - locations are in flux, and the music as "object" never stands still. Altromondo attempts to break away from the willful effort to measure time and musical place.