Three Ancient Preludes

Three Ancient Preludes is a three-movement piano solo featuring highly dramatic Romanesque-stylized themes rooted in a cinematic orientation. The piece is a celebration of contrasting themes ranging from the fanfares of the powerful (marches) to the lyrical of the intimate (pastoral) themes.

FIRST MOVEMENT

In a solidly constructed military march, this movement employs steady tonic-dominant bass relations and a few key modulations. The harmonizations depend on minor-inflected modalities and open fourth or fifth chords to provide fanfare-like, powerful punctuations that provide starkly staunch musical walls of sound, through which decorate and ornamental counterpoints pass through.

SECOND MOVEMENT

The minor second movement is a flowing 6/8 lyrical piece with an ornamental left-hand representative of the lyre instrument and uses two-handed rolling arpeggios as part of the harp-like ringing effect. Darkly hued and expressive in nature, it casts a spell of medieval music that is as beguiling and compelling as the Spartan and Gladiator legends themselves. Powerful in its low harmonic density, it is richly colored and exquisitely exotic.

THIRD MOVEMENT

The third movement intones a simple and stark melody across a beguiling meandering and veiled almost Oriental-inflected background. An introverted array of tumbling strains descending against chromatic and modal harmonies that are unstable and progress to far-removed tonal areas creating otherworldly atmospheric tones. Fragmentary motifs are also heard as subdued development of several disparate motives edge forward and fade away into obscure shifts of ostinato-like patterns. Soft, mildly dissonant chords echo a patina of string-like sustained angelic tensions, and disjointed, jagged rhythms complete the sense of an arabesque.