Black Crows

Black Crows is a stoic and static piece that remains firmly in the somber key of Eb minor. Both hands play repeating figurations of harp-like arpeggios across a slowly evolving landscape of delicate beauty and quiet reverence, like a very slow funeral march. Unlike owning to a Mahlerian idea in this music, this relatively short solo piano work strives, instead, for extremes in its restful plaintiveness and circular patterns that, over-time, give the listener a sense of melancholic wonderment that eventually becomes part of a textural background, like a Morton Feldman experimental piece. Black Crows breathes little newness in its brief life that would focus the listener’s ear on changing relationships. Instead, it is a short extension on a simple idea: that relationships from chord to chord and note to note become gently meaningless, as attempts to resist listening to similar textures and rhythmic ideas become a was in and of themselves amid a bland and colorless landscape of darkly-hued, muted, subtle, and hypnotic murmurings in a sea of hushed nothingness.