Reinvention

Here is something. New, but "new"? Hold that thought.

We see composers reinventing themselves -- not all composers: some need not, if only (it must be said) because they died just in time; many only once, and that upon their initial discovery of their true voice or manner.

Long ago, for example, the notion of Beethoven's "three styles" took hold, so firmly that we cannot help seeing them in retrospect, although his contemporaries gave him no credit for any consolidative phases. We see him reaching the end of one road, in the extensive but ultimately sterile sketches for a D-major piano concerto, but then almost immediately surging forward, still in 1815, with the 'cello sonatas Op. 102 -- NB. before the period of reduced activity that followed until 1819, which was therefore not down to any prolonged and difficult struggle to find a new manner.

Soon thereafter, Schubert also ran out of road; he was the one who had a long, hard time to find a way out, being nearly unable to complete any large-scale works between 1821 and 1824. The B-minor symphony was abandoned, not only because its third and fourth movements fell so far short of the mark set by the first two, but primarily because those first two movements were in the same tempo and meter, which set a trap from which there was no escape. The distinction between "fast" and "slow" music continued to vex Schubert from that point onwards.

These are only a couple of the most obvious examples and they involve composers of such stature as decisively to forbid comparison; but the general phenomenon is a commonplace one, and the time has come for me to reinvent myself. After working productively in a particular manner, producing a dozen or so large-scale works over the past ten or twelve years with (as I would think) acceptably little self-repetition, I found that my attempts to push that manner forward had abruptly (as I would think) descended into academicism.

The new piano pieces linked at the top of this post are an initial effort to discover aspects of new manners. They are not the reinvention itself; they are at best a beginning. They may, or may not, turn out to contain bits of a solution. I release them because I am confident enough that they are not merely inane and may even, in small ways, be instructive to study or fun to play.