Neches

Neches is a two-movement piano solo that is aphoristically short and uniquely jaunty in character. The two movements do not carry individual names but are marked as movements one and two. Following an expressionist aesthetic, both movements can be understood to be a singular, unified work consisting of two contrasting emotions.

Emboldened to champion the serial technique, this work is a reaction to the continuing daily workings in a blatantly tonal atmosphere of West Coast recording studios, and this compositional style was to be brief and atonal, yet lyrical and bearing resembles tonality in its fleeting but dodecaphonic inflections. The title is borrowed from a neighboring small Texas town where I grew up, whose title is analogous to an artfully written, vast connective thread of melodies meandering through like the rivers in the bayous of East Texas.