Four Hand Fun

for four hands on one piano

I wrote Four Hand Fun as a something of a joke to play with my friend Brenda Lee when she visited Yale. Brenda loves Mozart, so the piece starts off in something of a mock classical style with declamatory dyads announcing the tonality of D major. This classical sensibility is quickly disoriented as fast incessant repetitions and harmonic prolongations don’t really mask the fact that nothing is really happening. The material drifts off into strange and distant harmonies, whimsical melodies and counterpoints bursting out of the textures until the mock Mozartean backdrop collapses into a Latin dance. A mock fugue and some more dancing later and the piece collapses back into the original tonic key in a drunken, wobbling, lackadaisical version of the opening declamatory dyads, this time taking some time to line up properly for a perfectly non-cathartic ending which really achieves absolutely nothing – just like the rest of the piece, yet somehow it was fun… at least I thought so.

Performance time is about 4’.