Hayes Biggs

Piano

Composer's Note:

Susan’s Waltz grew out of the first Valentine I sent to my wife Susan after our relationship began, a short piano piece incorporating musical material derived by translating the letters of her name  into musical notes (see the top pitches in the right hand, mm. 1-4.) Because it was written rather hastily to give to her on Valentine’s Day, I never felt the piece was as fully realized a composition as its material merited. An opportunity to remedy that situation presented itself to me when my good friend, the composer and pianist Eric Moe, asked me to write a waltz for a new CD on the Albany label, The Waltz Project Revisited: New Waltzes for Piano (TROY689). Revisited on this recording is the Waltz Project initiated in the mid-1970s by composer-pianists Robert Moran and Robert Helps. This collaboration resulted in a collection of waltzes by contemporary composers as stylistically diverse as Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Philip Glass, Lou Harrison, Andrew Imbrie, Roger Sessions, Virgil Thomson, Joan Tower and Charles Wuorinen, published in 1978 by C. F. Peters Corporation, and an LP of a number of those waltzes released in 1980 on the Nonesuch label. The Albany CD, issued in 2004, draws half of its selections from the earlier collection; most of the remainder were specifically commissioned by Eric from friends and colleagues, and I am honored to be in that company.

Susan’s Waltz, subtitled Valse sentimentale, is fundamentally Romantic in spirit, both in terms of rhythmic flexibility—it  has many more tempo fluctuations than most of my music—and harmonic language.