Glenn Stallcop

Solo Piano

Composer's Note:

The music from this suite derives from the album of piano improvisation, Interstition, which I released on April 18, 2025, the tracks for which I recorded in the Summer of 2015.  The album is about interconnectivity, inspired by the writings of novelist Sophie Strand and the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake.  It is also about interconnectedness as represented in Buddhist philosophy, a theme I have explored in other of my works including a portrait of the Buddhist metaphor for interconnectivity, Indra’s Net, in my Violin Concerto.

I am, as a rule, not someone who seeks out or necessarily enjoys working with others, so the concept of interconnectivity serves to remind me of the impossibility of existing by myself.  Though I have pondered it for several years, it was not until I recently encountered a description by the eloquent Buddhist master, Thich Nhat Hanh, that I considered extending this connection to all beings in the past, present, and future! The realization of multi-dimensional interconnectivity had a profound effect on me. The inclusion of the third movement, Phantoms, in the set, which is haunted by the Brahms Waltz in Ab, Op. 39, No. 15, exemplifies this connection through time.

The suite is moody and impassioned, ethereal at times, and notably interconnected. The first, third, and fifth movements are more meaty while the second and fourth movements are connecting interludes.  In a suite devoted to connection, I felt it quite appropriate to have two interludes. The first movement, Rumination, ponders the nearly unfathomable depth of the cumulative interconnected hive-mind.  The roiling mass of conflicting ideas and opinions all merge into a beautifully balanced whole.  The final movement, Entanglement, conveys the emotional rollercoaster of having one’s existence being continually defined by context, and at last swallowed by the peaceful and fulfilling obscurity of coexistence.

There is quite a bit of shared melodic material between the different pieces.  The improvisational process tends to lend a familiarity to all of my music conceived in this way.  In a sense, I think of my piano pieces as all being variations on a theme of me.  There seems to be a collection of thematic material that keeps getting reshuffled and expressed in different ways.  My music for other instruments is often further adapted and reimagined, but the piano music, being closer to the original improvisation, retains this characteristic.  Suite from Interstition was completed in the Fall of 2026 in my home south of Ash Fork, AZ.