Surprisentopie for piano

Surprisentopie was completed in the spring of 2005. It is a piece in three movements: Individual movement titles and main title are all invented 'French' words. When I was a child, I loved to invent nonsense words, phrases, and short stories. I was about 12 when I came up with this phrase: Le goinfroniphere est surprisentopé par la tointijoncture du plurinotiphonte. Though the words have no meaning, their sounds are evocative. Here is a trial - and somewhat approximate - translation: The Atmospheric Greed is surprisentopped by the Rumfjoncture of the Multiphontes

And how is all this connected to the musical ideas? Goinfroniphere has a quasi-continuous - greedily-insistent - rhythmic motion of sixteenth notes, with a brief jazzy feel in the middle, a climax in the very high register. However, the somewhat Ravelian harmonies and mostly high registers reveal the atmospheric part of the 'greed'.

Tointijoncure, the middle movement, is dissonant both at the harmonic and rhythmic level. It is in 5/4 meter, has some ‘out-of-synch’ passages (a 19/16 meter), and is quite fast for a second movement. Surprisentopically, the movement doesn’t really link/connect the outer movements, except for a couple of unexpected triplets figures with octaves (M 91) found in Movements one and three, and a trille-like motive with seconds the next measure (M. 92).

The last movement Plurinotiphonte, contains various motives (among others, the alternating figures), taken from the first movement. However, these figures undergo many transformations throughout the movement, and the harmonic nature of the movement is very different from that of the first. This explains the ‘multi’ in ‘Multiphontes.’

Audio CD included