The piano duet Test Drive was composed in 2005, to celebrate the purchase of a Steinway grand piano for the recently opened Freeport (ME) Performing Arts Center. Accordingly, the work has been designed to explore all the timbral possibilities of the instrument – from clusters and trills, to lyric arioso lines, to inside-the-piano sonorities. Extremes of register are prominent (for example, the piece begins and ends with the highest and lowest possible notes), and quotations from the keyboard literature occur frequently. One quote which has been hinted at throughout, but appears fully-formed only near the work’s end, is relatively unfamiliar; it is the official State of Maine song, composed in the 1920s by a resident of Freeport!