Pachel's Bells

Description

Piano — This brief work is the result of a dare I accepted in 1986.xa0 Pianist Robert Spillman, then on the faculty of the Eastman School of Music, told me he was so tired of playing atonal music that he didn’t want to look at anything “more harmonically advanced then the Pachelbel Canon” for at least a year.xa0 Never one to turn aside from a challenge, I determined to write a little birthday present for Bob. Pachel’s Bells is, essentially, a kaleidoscopic viewing of the all-too-familiar Kanon in D, in which the key of each new episode is a departure from the previous phrase.xa0 Consequently, while all the melodic and harmonic elements of the Public Radio Fundraising Masterpiece are preserved in intact, the result is like looking at a famous photograph through a prism – one can recognize the images, but everything is a little “off,” and the resulting colors are such a departure from the original that the effect can be dizzying.