Prelude (1999) |

Performer:
Steven Masi, piano

I began this piece while messing around at the piano with singer-songwriter Liz Phair’s early song “Canary.” Phair's song begins with a haunting, deceptively innocent chain of heavily-reverbed piano octaves that mesmerized me and thus inspired the opening bars of octaves and major 7ths in Prelude.  The rest of the piece owes more to Debussy, whose music was my first great love as a pianist.