Includes the piano score plus reduction sketches analyzing the complexity of Bach’s original passage.

PROGRAM NOTES

Not infrequently, moments in Bach's music ascends to the "nose-bleed" limit of tonality. Bach understood tonality so deeply that he was able to bend it just to the breaking

point and then "return to Earth" with a sudden cadence of clarity or recognizable sequence of 5ths. But those moments "in the cracks" between key areas are quite

phenomenal. They sound like portals to music written hundreds of years later. Bach was keenly aware of what he was doing! It can't be an accident that the final

section in the final fugue of the second volume of the Well Tempered Clavier includes one of these remarkable moments. It's as if Bach wanted to send off this lavish
compendium of preludes and fugues that traverse all the tonal keys with a statement that there lies far more beyond!

In this dense, but brief and dissonant passage, I hear intimations of both Wagner and Schoenberg. I conceived of creating a short piece that would expand these handful of

measures with their crazy cross relations in such a way as to make these "sounds of the future" apparent. I begin by carving away most of the notes to expose the bare-bone

structure of dissonance that hovers over the entire passage. That sounds even farther than Schoenberg—all the way to Anton Webern. Then I gradually fill in Bach's actual

pitches and increase the tempo until halfway through, the actual Bach passage sounds like a whirling dervish. Logically, the second half of the piece takes notes away again

until the piece sounds as it began, but with a surprise ending that quotes Schoenberg's opening to his op. 11 piano pieces. By now, Schoenberg's style feels completely organic

with the rest of the piece. Only "we are no longer in Kansas."