Atlantic Sonata
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This piece is 17 minutes long. I hope you can lose yourself in the sunset. Thank you for coming
This is my "see I CAN do it" piece. I like writing short, say 4 to 6 minute pieces.
I think because I come from a pop background and an audience not used to sitting still. Jazz is often long winded too and very complex, as this
piece is, and maybe it's a bit of both. Basically I had the great luck to meet John Zeilinski, the pianist playing it now who showed me how to
extend and told me to write beyond my personal technique. He said, "I can play anything you write". And he did.
The first movement is much like my earlier writing, jazzy and tonal. When it comes
to a close one thinks the piece is over. This movement represents to me a 4 o'clock sort of feeling. Let down, tired, looking for solice.
The second movement comes as a pleasant surprize with music much more open, not depending
on chord progressions but formed more in space and incidents or events. I always see myself walking through the pine and oak toward the bay side water.
I call this the breeze in the trees, but not formally. The music IS like winds playing off your ear like the air on the pine and the birds late calls.
The last movement with only one note deep in the bass connects with the second movement exactly
like coming upon the bay water suddenly. No announcement, no signs, just a sloping drop to the water. Since the bay side is on Cape Cod, we are facing west,
we are facing Provincetown and just out of sight, Plymouth where this country is supposed to have started. By the way, that Plymouth Rock story is just a story
although the town designated a rock, walled it and tourists stare at it.
Back to the water, you know, I digress just as much in my music as I do in my speech or writing.
Just too much to say in a loosely strung way. Since we started at 4 in the afternoon, by the time we get to the bay some time has passed and there is a glimmer
of sunset on the waves that ripple toward you. this, of course, grows stronger and stronger, eventually getting wild, orange and red and purple, coloring the water
and the Provincetown Monument on the far right horizon. Wow, this is a cleansing, I needed to get my eyes "washed" with color. the smell is fishy and
salty and we have sand in our hair from lying down to take in the show. And then the sun dips just behind the horizon and the piano part works a little magic to give you the afterglow.
Take your seat back in the Concert Hall