six-hand piano

The instrumentation of this piece presents a rather irregular opposition between the expanded musical possibilities inherent in writing for three pianists and the spatial limitations that arise due to the fact that they play on one piano—dividing the keyboard into three more or less equal parts yields a range of but twenty-nine to thirty notes per player. Thus, since musical ideas in the piece often move rapidly between registers, one particular challenge was to orchestrate them with smooth transitions from one player to another. The title refers to the temporal language of the piece, which explores a disparate relationship between a series of tempi that become increasingly faster over time, and the surface rhythm, which tends to slow the music down somewhat.

Paul Frehner [ii-07]