Cool Air

Cool Air is a transcendental piano solo work wherein precepts of breezily flowing melodic lines across a stark backdrop of underlying rhythmic complexity and overlapping musical foreground is shaded with inflections of nuance, color, and vibrant textural evocativeness.

All depth and polarities equal, the integrated references of a new tonal language are, at a distance, uncharacteristically hushed as veiled echoes lacking spontaneity overwhelming the listener. The key focal point of the piece lies in its multiplicity of concurrent trajectories of descending lines and remarkable distinctive complexity in its multi-layered voices and rhythmic polyphony, which act as gentle ornamentation on an introspective subject.

In an intricately woven, almost orchestral atmosphere, the beginnings of the musical materials express rhythmic complexity and detailed oblique and parallel motions, as overall profligacy of quiet dynamics dominates the vast soundscape. Occasional dramatic punctuations, such as secco chords in the right hand, quickly dissipate and form larger-scale polyrhythms that mix with other protean voices in and of themselves. Yet for all the playful interplay between hands and tightly woven voices, an ethereal aural space redefines gentile contrapuntal technique, because the departures from voices that melt into other connective voices, distort and intertwine between absolute music that is consolidated by a rhythmically complex style.

The piece, however, differs from other complexities by virtue of the process that the linear melodic line finally does arrive — several times — only to spawn further descending lines in ever-increasing heterophony that is virtually unperceived and smothered unto a broadly dramatic web of connective tissues that stem from a daringly simple vertical gesture that is at the core of this piece.