LA Amen

I I began writing this piece in December of 2024 and completed it in January 2025. This was one of many recent pieces where I’ve been figuring out what the music means towards the end of the writing process. started fiddling around with the sound of prepared piano harmonics not quite knowing where I was going. I loved the muted, toy-like quality of the instrument with this preparation, but didn’t really know what it meant or its place in what I was writing. In January of 2025 I figured out its meaning while finishing the piece on the piano in my aunt and uncle’s house after we evacuated there during the fires. It became clear that this was about my feelings on the city I grew up in, exacerbated by a natural disaster that seemed like a strange corollary to those feelings.

The work repeats a I-IV chord progression, sometimes called an “Amen” cadence because of its prevalence at the end of traditional church hymns. Its distortion and degeneration, along with the caricatured quality of the prepared piano, mirror my own disillusionment with a false reverence for many places, things and people I’ve known.

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Instrumentation:

Solo Prepared Piano

(Preparations: swimmer’s earplugs or some similar malleable material to press onto strings and hold harmonics.)

Duration:

c. 7 min.

Performance at Mannes Composer Concert, April 18 2025