The Cloisters

The Cloisters is a piano solo that primarily uses single and open fourth and fifth-spaced left and right-hand melodies that form the basis of this hauntingly transparent and wistful work. A pale introduction surfaces, hinting at rhythmic pulses that quickly evolve and become the basis for the low accompaniment to support a lightweight yet heavily syncopated long linear descending melody in the right hand. Through suggestive and reflective modal shifting and diatonic panning from disparate harmonic relationships, a gentle and quiet theme restlessly begins to invoke the somber music of the old Benedictine order of stained-glass cathedrals being enveloped in walls of sonorous psalms of monastic choristers chanting hymnals before dawn.

Those echoes served as the inspiration of this piece in a visit to a northern Manhattan museum called The Cloisters in the late 2000s. Taut in its austere and delicate style, and defiant in its abrupt bass punctuations, this drone-like music can be felt in its reflective, worshipful, and primordial chant-like chorale.