Instrumentation: piano solo
First performed at Amherst College, Amherst, MA on 13 December 2013 by Alissa Leiser.
Performed at Ehrbar Hall, Vienna, on 6 August 2014 by Daniel Ang.
Winner of Third Place, National Young Artist category and Honorary Mention, International Young Artist category at the 2014 Golden Key Festival Piano Composition Competition.
Program Notes
Energetic Fixations is the first piece for piano solo that I composed during the nights while I was interning as an undergraduate research assistant at Harvard in 2013. It was composed after reading and going through some of the harmonic exercises in Vincent Persichetti’s splendid book, 20th Century Harmony: Creative Aspects and Practices. Despite the pedagogical background, the piece is not meant as merely an exercise. It tells a coherent musical narrative based on a limited set of musical materials, all of which are established in the first minute of the piece. Two different aspects of the piece’s personality clash: the more improvisatory character established by harmonies based on 2nds and 4ths in the beginning, and the more conventional, tonal and flowing writing that follows it. At the end, the two two personalities are meshed together.