Matthew Greenbaum

piano

Composer's note: ANOMALIES is a set of fourteen pieces for solo piano originally intended as studies in composition. They are anomalous both in their dissimilarity to each other, and in their dialogue with historical rather than contemporary music.They vary in mood, although irony predominates until the final two movements. A number of the movements--the third in particular--attempt an elasticity of time relations, where brief passages are elongated or compressed moment by moment so that each takes on a special temporal relation with similar passages; but always twisted out of shape. The sonatine is an homage of sorts to Milhaud, whose music had had exerted a strange attraction on me during the year it took to compose this work. I wrote these pieces for Charles Abramovic, whose formidable technique and expressive range make him an ideal exponent of the work.