Anger Management

Description

Piano 1, Piano 2 — Anger Management is a study in aggression and heartbreak, rejecting Tennyson’s maxim “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”xa0 My goal was to combine the narrative of romantic loss – with its elements of anger, nostalgia, despair and ultimately defiance – with a strict compositional technique and economy of material.xa0 The piece is based on two motives: the gruff, ascending three notes of the first bar and a descending half-step sigh, which is eventually transformed and intensified into an ascending major seventh.