Date
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2005
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I
wrote Tarantella for solo piano in 2005 when pianist Alexandre Dossin
expressed interest in having a piece from me. He and I were
faculty colleagues for one year (2001-2002) here at the University of
Louisiana at Lafayette and we became friends during that time. A
couple of years after he left for Wisconsin, he heard another piece of
mine, the Montuno and Fugue for two pianos and asked where "his" piece
was. Alex is one of the finest young pianists in the world (top
prize winner in the Argerich International Competition, among other
things), so I told him I'd definitely write him something if he were
willing to play it. I decided to write a tarantella after hearing
several guitarists at the Guitar Foundation of America 2005 competition
playing tarantellas by Mertz and Castelnuovo-Tedesco. I liked the
driving rhythms and virtuosity and felt that this might be the right
type of piece to write for Alex. The basic melodic and harmonic
building block of the piece is a "z-cell," something Bartók used
all the time that has qualities appealing both to fans of tonality and
to those who like some dissonance in their music. In this way it
is an homage to Bartók but also to one of my professors in
graduate school, Elliott Antokoletz, a leading Bartók scholar
and the person who taught me about Bartók's harmonic
language.
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