Dreamed Landscapes

Program Notes

Dreamed Landscapes (2017-18) is a suite of solo piano pieces co-commissioned by MTNA and the Pennsylvania Music Teacher's Association for pianist Henry Wong Doe. The idea of “landscape” functions dually in the piece: first, each movement is described with a physical landscape in its title; second, I was particularly interested in analogies to visual art, imagining these pieces as “sonic canvases” that could blend dreamy elements of surrealism alongside the pure and often-gripping expanse found in landscape paintings.

“Starfield” juxtaposes twinkling arpeggios in the piano's highest register with surging scales that ascend through the instrument in loud streaks of color. “Glaciers crumbling, assembling” imagines brittle ice fields, and the reverberations made by cracking ice, as it tumbles down a mountainside and reforms into new physical masses below. “Echoes of the Horizon” focuses on the glow of sun at the edge of canyon vistas, captured in the piano by using the middle pedal to create lingering sympathetic resonance on the piano's inside strings.

— Daniel Temkin