MAPPING MUSIC

Tag: piano

  • Mapping Music 8. TONALITY

    In traditional tonal music, or for a composer’s personal design, there are four main factors defining a tonal language: source scale (covered in Mapping Music 5); harmonic type; horizontal (voicing) connection; and tonal center, a basic concept for Common-Practice tonal music.

    A diatonic major or minor scale and harmonic structures built from it define a key and “tonic” home-base tonal center. (In the ancient modal music of the monophonic Gregorian chant it was called the “finalis,” as it was the expected final arrival destination of an extended melody.) Triads taken from the scale build a scaffold of harmonies, featuring the dominant chord (scale degrees 5, 7, 2, and sometimes 4) with its scale-degree 7 “leading tone” propelling a progression to resolve back to the tonic chord (scale degrees 1, 3, 5).

    In 20th-century music, some composers (notably Bartók) began to define tonal center contextually rather than by scale-and-key, writing melodic patterns and counterpoint that branched out from and converged back to a core base (but not necessarily bass) pitch. Twelve-tone music, derived from the full chromatic scale, would seem to be avoiding any tonal center, but some composers still built textures whose lines and counterpoint would emphasize one focal pitch-class.

    A matrix of choices

    In forging a tonal language, the composer develops preferences in each of these factors. Choices from each factor column can be mixed in a variety of ways. The composer designs by delving into more specific patterns, especially for the source scale (possibly, say, a six-note pitch-class set) and the harmonic type, establishing a preference for certain harmonic intervals (such as my favoritism for 7-semitone Perfect 5ths and 11-semitone Major 7ths).

    There are, of course, thousands if not millions of possible combinations of all these factors, a universe of tonal possibilities for the individual composer and a particular piece.

    Next, let’s dive more deeply into harmonic types and the factor of horizontal connections between successive harmonies.

    Constellation streams

    A stream of successive constellations, which we might nickname a “constream,” would traditionally be called a chord progression. In the following example, all stacks are 10 semitones tall; no common tones in the transposition choices.

    no common-tone connections

    In the next example, stacks of differing heights, with constellations that reduce to three different scale patterns: scale array 5 2, then 2 3, back to 5 2, then 4 1, and finally 2 5, inversion of 5 2.

    common-tone connection

    Now a longer, more mixed succession of interval stacks of constellations belonging to these same three scale patterns (2 5 or 5 2; 1 4 or 4 1; and 2 3).

    extended constreams

    Back to my constellation friends of Mapping Music 6, we can make some constreams with them.

    diatonic and chromatic successions of symmetrical constellations

    An intriguing example from the literature of great early modern music, an interlude near the beginning of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat:

    L’Histoire du Soldat excerpt

    This passage is intriguing in many ways. It looks like counterpoint between two woodwind instruments in high register. But both lines are quite simple and don’t seem to go anywhere. (In our GALAXIES: Structure chapter, we’ll discuss these questions of texture and counterpoint.) Introducing it here raises the question of harmony, of constellations and their arrays, though the passage doesn’t look at all chordal. Here is an array analysis of the constellations formed in the first through fourth bars then jumping to bar 10 and, finally, bar 14.

    L’Histoire du Soldat constellations

    Now you can see and hear more clearly the role played by array interval of 7 semitones (“Perfect 5th” as in above examples) and also 5, and 2 semitones in the harmonic continuity of the passage. (Also note 7 + 7 = 14; 5 + 2 = 7; 5 +5 = 10; 2 + 12 = 14; etc.)

    To illustrate that this is not all just theoretical, here is a simple etude composed using exactly the constellations and successions explored in Examples 12 and 17. It took only about an hour to compose this minute and a half in Sibelius. The title: the constellation Pleiades (“Seven Sisters”) is a tight cluster of 7 stars tagging along in the winter sky with Taurus as the Zodiac sails westward every night.

    Streams and 12-tone sets

    Let’s keep going. How about designing a succession of three four-pitch constellations, so that all 12 pitch classes of the chromatic scale are included but none repeated? (Traditional terminology calls such a set a 12-tone aggregate.)

    three sets make a row

    Constellations a) and c) are different “chord voicing” of the same scale pattern, 2 4 2 . Both scale patterns and all three interval stacks are symmetrical. And they all contain two 6-semitone “tritones,” giving the whole succession the tritone’s quality of ambiguity and the character of the succession a feeling of mystery.

    Progressive alterations of arrays

    Similarity of interval patterns can build coherence in a stream of constellations. Beyond functional common-practice harmony, this is a kind of process that composers of the 20th century and today can use to create a “new tonality”.

    Possible operations to transform an interval array into a closely related array:

    OPEN — Expand an interval by an octave, adding 12 semitones

    FUSE — Join two adjacent intervals to make a larger interval, the sum of their sizes

    DELETE — Remove an interval, shortening the stack’s height

    SUBDIVIDE — Insert a pitch to divide an interval into two smaller intervals, whose sum equals the original interval

    PROPOGATE — Append or insert an interval of a size already present into the stack

    INVERT — Reverse the registrar order of the stack — turn it upside down

    alteration examples

    There are operations that more significantly alter the character of the interval array.

    REDISTRIBUTE — Fuse two adjacent intervals into one larger interval then re-subdivide it into two different smaller intervals

    SHRINK / STRETCH — Alter one interval size by other than an octave, leaving others unchanged

    COMPRESS / EXPAND — Alter all intervals in the stack by adding or subtracting each by the same number of semitones, or multiplying each by a constant

    These alterations are listed in order, from the mildest alteration producing a similar array (redistribution) to the most dramatic producing a substantially different array, compression or expansion of the whole array (preserving little from the original but its symmetry). Here is an example employing these altering transformations.

    more alterations, with common-tone connections

    The other element of coherence in this example is the many common-tone connections between one chord and the next, establishing a slow-moving stability. Another example of the same interval stacks, same succession of alterations, but choosing transpositional level of each constellation to create as many 1-semitone voicing connections as possible (10 such voicing connections in the following example) makes the con stream’s sense of progressive change stronger.

    more alterations, with semitone connections

    Finally, another example etude, using this last constream . . .

    © 2026 – All Rights Reserved

    Thomas S. Clark

    TClarkArtMusic.com 

  • Mapping Music 3. CHANGE

    Harmonic rhythm is the pace at which chords change in common-practice tonal music. Often in songs or simpler instrumental music, the harmony changes periodically, like once every measure or every half-note or every beat. Even when the rate of chord change is this uniform, it often accelerates approaching a cadence at the end of a phrase or other sectional unit. Calculus suggests that there can be a change in the rate of change, a second-order differential. Beethoven offers something like this in his very late work, the String Quartet No. 16 Opus 135. Here is an excerpt from the Allegretto first movement:

    String Quartet Op. 135 Allegretto, mm. 25-48

    An analytic sketch of the harmonic-root-foundation bass line reveals that F major gives way in the first four bars to a tonicization of the dominant, C major, starting with its dominant, G major:

    The rate of chord change starts as every 4 beats, eventually quickening toward the end of the excerpt to a different chord every 8th-note — an eight-fold quickening of harmonic pace! As you listen again, notice if you feel this intensifying compression of events.

    Going deeper into the tonal groupings of these harmonies, the starting key of F Major gives way to various tonicizations of G, then C. Here is a reductive sketch showing the durations of these tonicizations.

    Op.135 excerpt harmonic reduction

    Since this section is 24 measures long, it could have been composed as three equal 8-measure periods. Instead, the middle-ground tonal rhythm is surprisingly non-periodic, an irregular durational stream consisting of 8, 10, 10, 4, 7, 1, 1, 5, and 2 quarter-notes.

    Beethoven was beyond eccentric at this late point in his career; Op. 135 was the last work he ever completed. Yet the elasticity of harmonic rhythm found in it is a hallmark of his earlier styles as well.

    Beyond meter

    Arising in the middle of the 20th century, highly complex, elastic rhythms began to be composed, in which every durational value was different and notes or events do not group into periodic measures or phrases. An example composed in 1971 is an elegy that makes a conscious effort to avoid articulating periodic beats or falling into groups of notes of periodic duration.

    Meter signatures are present only for notational purposes and change four times in the passage. Only four of the 22 notes fall “on the beat” and only three of those articulate a downbeat.

    Since the note values are so slightly or drastically different, we can measure each duration from the start of a note to the start of the next note as a multiple of fine “time particles” each one-twelfth of a quarter-note. The durational stream is blatantly non-periodic: 30, 12, 44, 8, 14, 6, 21, 9, 31, etc. The rhythmic range of the first four measures is higher than 7, rhythmic variety at 9. The next three measures have a higher rhythmic range of more than 11 and rhythmic variety of 8 (due to the 9-particle dotted 8th-notes that occur five times).

    Beyond a mathematical comparison, a time graph mapping the durations reveals to the eye no periodicity, no perceived meter or regular conforming rhythmic pattern.

    Elegy rhythm graphed

    The rhythm floats above or beyond meter or pulse in a dreamlike, elastic stream. [From Night Songs (1971)]

    Free time

    Defeating the notated meter in this way, by avoiding beats and periodic, conforming note values, was developed to free a stream of events from periodic pulse, thus freeing the listener’s sense of time flow – free time itself. The logical next step, developed concurrently in mid-20th century, was to remove meter entirely as even a notational necessity. Just like the time graphs we have been using to visualize timing of events, a horizontal, proportional scale (such as one half-inch equals one second of time) enables the horizontal placement and spacing of notes on a staff to suggest visually subtly different durations, both of sustained sounds and the time spacing from one event to another.

    Spatial notation

    Spatial notation — non-metric representation of time by proportional horizontal spacing of notes

    After “Elegy,” the first movement of the unaccompanied trombone piece Night Songs, the third movement, “Somniloquy,” was originally notated in this manner – what came to be known as “spatial time.”

    Somniloquy notated spatially

    In his one partially preserved manuscript, On Time, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote about “the unity of opposites” and “flux,” meaning change. “It is not possible to step into the same river twice.” He also imagined that the cosmos is shaped as an enormous vortex of fire.

    That image ignited musical sparks in my imagination for the third movement of my early solo piano work, Geography of the Chronosphere (1975), subtitled “Heraclitean Vortex.”

    The score, in non-metric spatial notation, articulates explosive bursts of notes separated by irregular spans of reverberation.

    Heraclitean Vortex excerpt

    An analytic graph of loudness shows these bursts occurring at unpredictable time intervals, in moments (not so much phrases) of varying length, from 3 to 11 seconds.

    time graph of 11 moments in Heraclitean Vortex excerpt

    Prime time

    Meter, as a periodic grouping of beats, almost always involves groups of two, three, or multiples of these factors. We call them duple meters if the groups are multiples of two, triple meter if multiples of three. Likewise, subdivisions of beats are usually subdivided into twos, threes, or multiples. Sixteenth-notes divide by two to the fourth power.

    A prime number is defined as having no integer (whole number) factors other than one and itself. In metric structure, prime numbers, with no sub-grouping factors of two or three, are more complex – 5 8 or 7 4 time for example. A musical stream that avoids metric regularity can be built with the interaction of prime number series. When repeated periodic streams of note values equivalent to 5, 7, 11 or 13 smaller time values (such as eighth-notes or sixteenth-notes) interact in time, layers of rhythm will seldom strike notes together to make a contrapuntal accent that feels like a downbeat.

    Here is a map illustrating this potential for non-metric independence:

    repeating prime numbers interact

    The bottom row of numbers shows rhythmic values of the composite rhythm, time points marked by an attack of a sound in one strand. If the streams start together as shown, they don’t all come together again until after 5,005 time-units. If each time-unit were a sixteenth-note duration, that would be after 312 four-four measures!

    This is the hidden rhythmic scheme for Night Sky, layers of pitched sounds that don’t synchronize into any meter or composite periodicity. Though not regular and certainly not metric with a pulse, time points are not at all random. Listening to it while not looking at the score’s notational details, pay attention to the way in which the sounds mark points in the flow of time – as stars mark light points in the night sky.

    Night Sky score

    A direct photographic rendering of the middle system of the score illustrates the non-metric, asynchronous timing of note events in a broad texture of sounds. 

    Night Sky score abstracted

    Do stars make spatial patterns? Of course, that’s what our fanciful constellation names are all about. But are those patterns regular, metric, periodic, symmetrical? No – that is part of their magic, a magic that can be metaphorically translated into floating musical time. 

    Beyond Time

    From the classical tradition of Beethoven’s accelerating harmonic rhythm, we jump finally to the very modern stretching of time itself. Einstein explained gravity as the stretching of “Space/Time.” From composers such as Cage and Feldman in the ‘50s, we experience isolated events, moments of sound separated by extended pause. No pulse drives the clockwork of time; it stretches immeasurably into contemplation. Listen.

    Lei Liang, My Windows (2007)

    _____________

    © 2026 – All Rights Reserved

    Thomas S. Clark

    TClarkArtMusic.com

  • journal 12. Zweite Wiener Schule

    Vienna, 1992 —

    The so-called “Second Viennese School” consisted of influential master composer Arnold Schoenberg and his protegés, Alban Berg and Anton Webern in early 20th-century Vienna. They pioneered a compositional approach described succinctly by Wikipedia as “totally chromatic expressionism without a firm tonal centre, often referred to as atonality; and later, Schoenberg’s serial twelve-tone technique.”

    When I began studying composition at Michigan in 1968, I quickly became immersed in exploration of pitch structure and broader tonality freed from the long-traditional restrictive limits of tonality: diatonic major and minor keys and their chromatic extensions, triadic sonorities and tonal centers. The complexity of this new musical realm is not truly “atonal” but rather an opening to a universe of fascinating, colorful possibility.

    Three pieces of the early 20th century, which I studied deeply in the 1970s and later used extensively in my teaching of modern music, were each masterful explorations of musical sound color.

    • Claude Debussy’s La Mer (1905), an iconic tone poem of Impressionistic musical painting, was discussed in Journal 1. Musique Française.
    • Anton Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21 (1928) is maybe the briefest piece ever titled as a symphony, a succinct, two-movement work whose first movement is a delicate gem of pointillistic color and complex 12-tone harmony.
    • Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16 (1909); the third piece is a gentle study of orchestral sound color titled “Sommermorgen an einem See (Farben)” — (Summer Morning by a Lake: Colors”.

    After fifty years, these works are embedded more deeply than ever in my musical consciousness.

    It was only in 1992, on a side trip by bus from Brno, that I visited Vienna, the great musical city of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart in his last years. Mozart’s grave, not in the main cemetery but on the edge of the city, was hard to find but emotionally powerful to visit.

    Farben

    “Farben” is an early Schoenberg piece that is all about instrumental sound color and exotic harmonic color. The chords are not triads but rather atonally “dissonant” sonorities that place the instrumental colors in close, glowing pitch-interval proximity.

    LISTEN ›

    Five Pieces for Orch – III (Farben)

    Chicago Symphony on YouTube

    My recent piece, Farben, pays special homage to Schoenberg’s masterpiece, layering kaleidoscopic wind-instrument colors to build massive, morphing constellations, echoing Webern’s hidden chord-color symmetry.

    FARBEN

    Clark 2025 (TC-149)

    I have long admired and been influenced by the music of Anton Webern. Known historically as a member of the Second Viennese School with Alban Berg and mentor Arnold Schoenberg, the three were pioneers of so-called atonal music and 12-tone-row serial harmonic organization. I find the term “atonal” misleading and negative, as their 12-tone processes achieved new “12-tone tonalities” — not simply a rejection of traditional tonal harmony but also striving to create new and more complex tonalities.

    What I admire about Webern’s mostly-quiet instrumental miniatures (his Symphonie Op. 21 has only two sparsely-scored movements) is the delicate, crystalline quality of his pitch constellations; and their gently lyric, precious setting into transparent, pointillistic textures, pearl-strings of separate, delicate instrumental colors (called Klangfarbenmelodie). The first movement is built on one enormous, static, 13-pitch chord containing all 12 pitch classes of the chromatic universe in a symmetrical interval pattern, a palindrome interval pattern, the same top to bottom as bottom to top.

    Todesfall in Mittersill

    Webern’s mentor, Schoenberg, as a Jew was compelled to emigrate to the U.S. in 1933 before it was too late. Webern, not Jewish, stayed in Vienna, where he was born, suffered through and survived World War II, only to be fatally shot by a U.S. Army soldier during the Allied occupation of Austria in 1945. My homage to this beautiful musical mind tries to capture his music’s “lyrical, poetic concision” (Wikipedia).

    WEBERN ELEGY

    Clark 2024 (TC-115)

    Neue Tonalität

    My compositional excursions in 12-tone tonality traverse many of my compositions. One that sums it up well, if not succinctly, is VIENNESE SKETCHES. A set of “Twelve Miniatures in Twelve Tones,” parts I through IV are adapted from Webern Elegy , and V through XII from MapLab7 – For Little Arnold from my book, Mapping the Music Universe.

    Not intended to portray the historical European city, VIENNESE SKETCHES instead explores various textures and tonalities using the musical techniques of the Second Viennese School. My goal was to create a complex counterpoint of sound constellations that is less dissonant and more sonorous — my sense of a new tonality.

    VIENNESE SKETCHES

    Clark 2023 (TC-131)

    ___________

  • MapLab: A Small Sonata

    A sonata is typically a multi-movement piece for solo piano or for an instrument with piano. A shorter form with just three connected sections, the middle slower and quieter, can be called a sonatina. Here is an inside look at how one was composed, step by step. Like the MapLabs in Mapping the Music Universe, this guided tour is in the form of a recipe you can follow to write your own sonata.

    Choose a model

    I started formal composition study in 1968, first with composer Eugene Kurtz, based in Paris but filling in that semester at the University of Michigan. A proponent of modern French music, his compositional models included Debussy and Ravel. He assigned me to immerse myself in deep study of their music, in particular Ravel’s 1905 work, SONATINE.

    I met Beth, a flower lover, in Interlochen in 1975. She had been a promising flute student at Aspen, but was then embarking on a journalism career specializing in horticultural writing.

    The Ravel study came back to me later in my career, as I began to adopt its lush, bright harmonic language and a gentle French Impressionist quality. My SONATINE for Beth (2025) brings together the Ravel study, the flute sound, and (in my video version on YouTube) even the flower motif.

    Start with a generating idea

    The impelling theme can be a melody, a rhythmic pattern, a special kind of chord, or a non-musical image such as a painting or poem.

    Sonatine for Beth is spun entirely from a single harmonic progression, seven chords, each stacking one Perfect 5th interval above another.

    The Perfect 5ths in the two hands are separated by one or more octaves, highlighting this strong interval as a characteristic sound for the piece.

    Now some basic tools to develop and vary a generating theme.

    Transposition

    The whole five-chord progression can be transposed. The harmony is heard plainly in a middle section as ten block chords. The last five chords are a transposition of the first five, up three semitones, starting on the bass pitch Eb instead of C.

    Sequence is successive statements of a pattern transposed by a consistent interval.

    Here is another transposition of the whole ten-chord sequence:

    This harmonic material generates melodic lines and many arpeggio patterns, in successive variations of changing register, intensity, and rhythmic pace. Let’s go through the compositional unfolding of this thematic idea.

    Extract a melody and bass

    Since the starting idea is simply a chord progression, we can select individual tones from each chord for a melody. The most obvious selection is the highest pitch of each chord, even if it is not in a soprano singing range.

    At letter A the melody is given a slightly independent rhythm to help set it off from the chords, in addition to the different sound color of the flute. Also, the lower chord tones are articulated one at a time, making a bass line also rhythmically distinct, faster than the half-note chords. (The Bb in the bass line’s first bar is a passing tone, not a chord tone.)

    Add arpeggios

    An arpeggio is any pattern articulating chord tones one at a time. Usually in order lowest to highest or back down, the individual chord tones can be articulated in any order. At letter A shown above, we already saw the left hand articulate its chord tones one at a time. In the introduction, the right hand is partially broken up into arpeggios.

    In the next variation below, right-hand treble chord tones and still some bass chord tones are arpeggiated. Now all three lines (flute, right hand, left hand) have distinct rhythmic patterns, though congruent with each other in the established 4 4 meter.

    Next, the flute arpeggiates chord tones in eighth-notes, with the left hand simplified to quarter-notes of two pitches from each chord.

    Rhythmic variations

    Variation D simplifies the flute melody to just two half-note chord tones per bar.

    The two hands reunite rhythmically to place some chords after the downbeat and between flute notes.

    Counterpoint

    The original term, contrapunctus, translates “point against point” — two or more independent lines interacting in time.

    A more active rhythm for the flute line leaves time gaps that can be filled in by another line. The right hand selects chord tones to make a similarly playful rhythmic line that mostly alternates and sometimes lines up with the flute rhythm.

    The harmonic progression is still there but just hinted at by the chord tones selected for these interacting lines.

    Variation F continues this back-and-forth rhythmic interaction of the flute and piano right hand, now adding back in the left-hand chord-tone pairs with a simple rhythm for a supporting third contrapuntal line.

    Texture

    Having reached a complex level of three rhythmically interacting, independent contrapuntal lines, a nice contrast will be to simplify. Variation G reduces to a lower-register flute line and only a much simplified skeletal supporting line above it in the right hand.

    Then the texture begins to revert rhythmically to a simpler alignment of all chord tones.

    This paves the way back to a simple piano texture revealing the fundamental thematic chord progression.

    Shape a time form

    What is the plan for the whole? How will the various versions of the generating idea unfold in the larger time span of the whole piece?

    The quiet letter I variation is the apex of an arch form . . .

    • starting with simple
    • building up more rhythmic and textural complexity
    • reaching a stable plateau
    • subsiding back to what started it all.

    That sets up a recapitulation of the whole process, building up textural complexity again, first with the high two-part counterpoint:

    Then with three voices:

    Flute line “calming down”:

    Coda

    A good essay ends with a conclusion or a summary restatement of the thesis.

    Our musical coda summarizes with a last return to the beginning. The chords are back to their very low and very high registers. The flute makes a small melodic arch, ascending to the pitch B, then climbing down gently to its lowest possible pitch, C.

    Fine

    A final edit and audit are mandatory. In the case of our example, listening revealed that the beginning needed a piano introduction with some rhythmic vitality. Some sections were also reordered to improve the flow. Thus, the piece will not begin with a plain statement of the progression, and there will be a somewhat different order of other events.

    Now listen to the whole 6-minute parade of variations on a single chord progression.

  • journal 1. Forest Paths

    Howell, 1967 —

    In 1967 I was already earnestly composing for piano, trombone (my own instrument), even for orchestra. Living beside the Shiawassee River’s glacial-moraine beginnings in rural Livingston County Michigan, my best pastime was hiking along the creek’s forested banks. I was already going to Ann Arbor for trombone lessons and Youth Symphony rehearsals.

    In fall 1967, after my 18th birthday, I moved to Ann Arbor and enrolled at the University of Michigan. Though not yet a music major, I began playing bass trombone in the university orchestras. For 8 years, Ann Arbor with beautiful Huron River running through it was my forested Michigan home.

    The year before I was born, John Cage wrote a gentle, beautiful piece for piano, one simple enough that my 1967 piano skill could have handled. It also expressed my own urge to amble along freely improvised paths of musical exploration.

    John Cage – Dream (1948)– Damian Alejandro, piano

    At age 17, I never dreamed that I would meet John 24 years later (in Denton Texas of all places), a gentle soul who loved mushrooms. And I had yet to discover this piece or any John Cage music. But I was also writing simple and (I thought) beautiful piano music.

    Two pieces for piano that expressed my attitude of wonder while wandering in the woods were updated fifty years later with my 2023 editing skills. “Mystic Breeze” and “Light” were my 12th and 18th completed TC compositions. “Riverbank” is from a 1967 sketch of an “interlude” for trombone and piano.

    They make a nice set of three, revealing that before formal study my compositional explorations were already discovering more exotic harmonies and rhapsodic forms resembling Debussy’s Impressionism and even the post-tonal possibilities of 12-tone rows.

    ARBOR SKETCHES

    Clark 1967 (TC-12/18)

    • 1. Breeze
    • 2. Riverbank
    • 3. Light

    Brno

    Twenty-four years later in 1991, I was invited to perform at the 26th Brno International Music Festival. It would lead me on a path of musical and cultural exploration that has filled my life since with beauty. (I had also married a beautiful Czech-American woman in 1976.)

    Brno is the capital of the Moravian province of what was then Czechoslovakia. Brno was the home city of the great 20th-century Moravian composer, Leoš Janáček. After visiting his home and school in Brno and his summer home in Hukvaldy, I began to study his music.

    Two things captured my interest. Like Bartok, he embraced and collected the folk music of his homeland. He also exalted in nature, walking around the wooded hills of Hukvaldy’s castle ruins, and collected his own transcriptions of bird calls.

    While there on the first visit, I was commissioned to compose a ballet for the local dance theatre company. Inspired by Janáček’s birds, I began to write my own music for what would become the ballet, PTACí (“Birds”).

    Lesní cesty

    In a music store in Brno, I also discovered his marvelous 1911 set of piano pieces, the title of which translates “On the Overgrown Path.” On a return trip, I was able to visit the Moravian Music Archives in Brno to examine his original hand-written manuscript of the pieces.

    Excerpted from Series I:

    • No. 5, They Chattered Like Swallows
    • No. 6, Words Fail!
    • No. 7, Good Night!
    • No. 8, Unutterable Anguish
    • No. 9, In Tears
    • No. 10, The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away!

    Po zarostlém chodníčku – – – Josef Páleníček, piano