All the Clothes in a Woman’s Closet

All the Clothes in a Woman’s Closet is a substantial piano solo in the minimalist style that is important, not only for marking the beginnings of a new exploratory direction of compositional writing and finding an excitingly new, highly personalized style but also of developing the use of many compositional techniques that have been heretofore unutilized.

As the title suggests, the matching of colors from an assortment of dizzying amounts of garments, coats, shoes, etc. that one would expect to find in a woman’s closet, as the conceit goes, this piece attempts to fly through a flurry of activity and match its own unique style of colors, textures, and timbres in a series of over a dozen differing harmonic areas and progressing through the entire range of the keyboard in even extreme ranges of highs and lows. A torrent of cascading syncopated rhythms, splashes of colors, and constant repetition of patterns of varying notes, pitches, and degrees of scalar fragments that repeat and recur in various harmonic instances, serve to underpin the idea of forming the roots of the modal sections, while upper voices regularly oscillate between different notes a repeated chord, making this piece itself a study in the category of what Steve Reich termed “process music”.

The piece is written in three main sections without interluding material serving as a connective tissue that keeps the structure solidly connected and unbroken and, when viewed in its entirety, forms an almost perfectly even three partitions.