Ryan Chase

I showed up to college with a motley score collection. I was lucky enough to get some piano lessons in early childhood, though they abruptly ended when I was eight. So, along with the volumes of Czerny, Hanon, Clementi sonatinas, Mozart sonatas, and Bach folios that I was prescribed by Takano Nakamura, the suitcase I unpacked also contained Bartók’s sixth volume of Mikrokosmos; Berg’s Piano Sonata; the second volume of a sight-reading series entitled A Dozen a Day; the first volume of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book; the songbook to the musical Les Misérables; the piano-vocal scores to You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and The Cradle Will Rock; and a (very) unauthorized copy of version three of the real book. Thanks to Borders, I also had scores of Stravinsky’s Firebird and The Rite of Spring, Debussy’s String Quartet, Ravel’s String Quartet, and John Corigliano’s first symphony. I had a few discs of the Ligeti and Penderecki works that appeared in Kubrick’s films, a CD of Jennifer Higdon’s Cityscape and Concerto for Orchestra, and one containing a sampler of the Mannes composition faculty at the time: Robert Cuckson, Leo Edwards, Keith Fitch, David Loeb, and David Tcimpidis. In 2004, all of this music was colliding in my mind with what I had best under my hands: charts by Mingus, Coltrane, Miles, Duke, and the rest of the best.

After my first lesson, Keith sent me down to Lincoln Square to purchase scores of Messiaen’s Quatour pour la fin du Temps and Ligeti’s first book of études but at Mannes, we all got the three B’s: Bach, Bartók, and Bill Evans. (Also a lot of Bona.) We played The Beatles, Billie Holliday, and Björk after class and in Fred Fehleisen’s. Downtown, I heard the rest of the alphabet from Adams to Zorn. Uptown, they gave me more B’s: Britten, Boulez, and one in Orchestration. I deserved that one: I wrote a very unplayable string quartet as an undergraduate and several more since! Aaron Travers would teach me how to orchestrate later, but Keith was the one who first guided my ear toward more delicate nuances possible in line and form. Around this time, my musical inventions were coarse contours, disconnected gestures, and efforts to understand how instruments other than the piano functioned.

Processing my teacher’s advice while considering Bill Watterson’s economy of line, shade, and proportion, these four preludes (or panels) are the cruder inkings of a rambunctious truant working out these musical properties. The improvisational comfort zones to which I still return are explored here: mixed meters from folk traditions and already-fused genres, combinatorial and prolongational games abandoned in progress, polytonal noodling, and cascading deformed quartal sonorities.