Worth Hearing Again...

Blanche Abram

In 2016 the fantastic pianist Blanche Abram, who’s been a wonderful friend and supporter of my work, played four of my series of 24 Intervals pieces as a part of a LICA concert. She did a beautiful, heartfelt job with these, and I was really pleased to come across the live recording from that day and hear them again. I thought you might also enjoy hearing them.

The Intervals series came about when a musician friend of mine once told me that her favorite songs were those that began with the jump of an octave. Like “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”. It got me to thinking about how the first two notes of any piece of music really set up what will follow. That octave jump, that interval, is only one of twenty-four possible intervals in a one-octave scale. That is to say, there are twenty-four different intervals with which to begin a piece of music. I wrote these twenty-four pieces with the idea of having the first two notes of each of them start with a different interval. Writing them has been like a series of adventures, each of which begins by taking the first two steps, and then discovering where they will lead.

I have been very pleased to have had so many performances of them by so many pianists around the world. Haddassah Guttman recorded all 24, which you can find here, and the sheet music is available as a collection or individually here.