Symphony 7

Symphony #7 was commissioned by the New England Philharmonic, was written in 2017, and premiered by the Philharmonic on April 27, 2019, conducted by Richard Pittman. Each of the four movements is a tone poem on one of the four elements.

The first movement written was Water, whose opening came to me in a dream. Of course, after writing down that opening, I realized I needed to lengthen it with an insertion. The music sort of depicts the path of a spring on a mountain trickling and then flowing into a stream and into a river and into the ocean. There are sparklies in the mallet percussion representing sunlight gleaning off the water.

II. is a tone poem about Air, III. is about Earth — which has a lot of piano-to-forte gestures on single notes — and IV. is about Fire.

The recording is from the premiere.

ziodavino · Symphony 7

Penalty Box

 Penalty Box was written for Holly Roadfeldt, and was my first so-called post pandemic piece. It was written in May-June, 2021, right after covid mandates were lifted in Massachusetts.

I had originally shared on social media a picture of myself gesturing during a Brandeis colloquium, and I titled the post "Illegal Use of Hands." At this giddy post-pandemic point, it seemed it was a good title and premise for a piano piece. Then, naturally, it occurred to me that other sports penalties could serve as the idea for short piano pieces, I made a list of a lot of them, and eventually I wrote two more.

Holly and her husband Kirk did a multicamera video of it, after Holly had performed it several times, and here we have it.

Locking Horns

 Locking Horns is a chamber horn concerto that was commissioned by Sequitur for hornist Daniel Grabois. It has a narrative that the ensemble hornist tries to usurp the soloist role, and fails. Here is Sequitur's recording.

Persistent Memory

Persistent Memory was written in 1995-96 in memory of Lily Auchincloss, who sponsored my Rome Prize. Accordingly I started it while in Rome (since I wasn't that good at doing like the Romans) and I wrote a long elegy movement emanating from the opening five note melody in cellos.

The piece was commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and the contract specified exactly how many players in each string section: 5-4-3-3-1. That gave me the idea of melodic lines with "split ends", as in melodies that cadence, however strongly or weakly, on chords that emerge within each section, depending on how many players were available. The elegy is split up into all strings, all winds, all strings, and finishes on a 16 note chord — the number of string players.

The elegy goes attacca into a kind of scherzo movement, cast as four variations (on the elegy music), a scherzo in compound time plopped right there in the middle, and four more variations. Weird form, huh? The fifth variation, the one right after the scherzo, recaptures the slowness of the elegy music, and gives the first horn a high, difficult melody before resuming as fast music. That is the "persistent memory" of the title (as well as the obvious "in memory of"). I wrote the second movement at Yaddo in 1996, more than a year after I wrote the elegy, because teaching and kid's ballet to write. You can view the complete sketch for the piece here.

The piece was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. The recording is tracked, even though the movements are designed to be attacca.

Winged Contraption

This is my second non-student orchestra piece, dedicated to Martin Boykan at 60. I had been invited to a birthday celebration for him, but I couldn't make it, since I was at the Djerassi Foundation in California at the time (writing my first non-student orchestra piece), so I promised to write him a piece for his birthday. I wrote all of it at Yaddo in the summer of 1991, on a schedule of two pages per day. Why that? The conceit is that the piece for a 60th birthday would be 60 pages in orchestral score. Also, it's all copied by hand, so I was both composing and copying daily, occasionally joining some of the Yaddo group at a dance club in Saratoga Springs (She's Homeless was the popular jam at the time).

The opening cello melody is extracted from a Boykan piano piece, and a few other quotes from Marty are in there as well.

Préludes Book 10

Préludes Book 10 was started in December, 2019 and finished in June, 2020. The titles are fragments of well-known proverbs.

Two in the Bush (#91) is rhythmically like quick swing eighths, though it's usually not particularly swingy. The left hand plays only on the beat and the right hand plays only off the beat. Towards the climax, some hesitant stride happens and then fades away. Here is MIDI.

Where There's Smoke (#92) is a fairly fast piece built on only major triads and repeated notes. MIDI here.



More Than You Can Chew (#93) starts with fast broken octaves, breaks them into chords, settles on repeated notes, and then busts out. MIDI.

ziodavino · 93 More Than You Can Chew

What You Can Do Today (#94) mashes very wide-spaced bebop licks (five octaves apart) together with syncopated chords and rather fast, and brief, comping. MIDI.



While The Iron Is Hot (#95) puts fits of thick chorale chords against a broken octave walking bass. Hier ist midi.



Eggs in One Basket (#96) was prompted by me remembering the surprise boogie woogie near the end of Yehudi Wyner's piano concerto, and it's based on that common left-hand pattern all messed up and blown to pieces. MIDI here, with the right hand getting pretty soft in two places.

ziodavino · 96 Eggs In One Basket

Don't Fix It (#97) is derived from a texture of overlapped broken octaves, and the pun is obvious. MIDI here.

ziodavino · 97 Don't Fix It

What Goes Around (#98) develops a terse quick repeated-chord figure, interrupting in the middle with some slow swing eighths. MIDI.

ziodavino · 98 What Goes Around

With A Single Step (#99) is the one from Book 10 that I can play. It's a serious slow chorale adapted from my song cycle The Mystery of Deep Candor. Here is some serious midi.

ziodavino · 99 With A Single Step

All Good Things (#100) is a manic piece based around a 7-6 figure, and quotes Étude #1 E-Machines three times. MIDI.

ziodavino · 100 All Good Things

Solo piano music (non-étude non-prélude)

I wrote Blue Horizon for the New Music National Artist Competition (Chicago) in 2013. The competition didn't happen, so the piece floated around and I saw a score for sale in the music store in Lexington (Peters had never sent me a copy). And put a picture on twitter. Holly Roadfeldt saw the picture, learned the piece, and premiered it at Lafayette College. This lovely and echoful performance was at the Avaloch Foundation in New Hampshire, where she and her husband Kirk were resident.



I wrote Sara in 2002 for Jim Goldsworthy, and in memory of Sara Doniach. The two of them had premiered my Crackling Fire for piano four hands about a decade earlier. Jim asked for it to be easy enough so Sara's piano students could play it. Having only the opening major sixth at hand, I asked Rick Moody to write the first chord. He said B-A-D because it was how he felt at that moment. I sharped the D.



I wrote Hotfingers for Nick Phillips's American Vernacular project. It's in three movements and is played spectacularly by him here. Hotfingers is a brand of glove, and Peters had been cold for a while after Hurricane Sandy; so I bought Gene Caprioglio, my guy at Peters, some Hotfingers gloves for work, and dedicated the piece to him.







I wrote Crackling Fire in 1990, rather quickly, for Jim Goldsworthy and Sara Doniach. After the premiere, I hadn't thought of it for almost 30 years (and I couldn't find my score, so Jim had to send me a copy of his), and Sarah Bob programmed it on New Gallery Concert Series. Here are Geoff Burleson and Marilyn Nonken doing it in October 2019.