Palermo Canons (2021-2024)
for solo piano [16:00]
SCORE at COMPOSERS EDITION
I. Four Bells
II. Spingere
III. Tirare
IV. Convex Mirror
V. Broken Tiles
VI. Cilindro
VII. Six Bells (Epiphany)
In February 2020, my wife and I put in a bid on an apartment in Palermo. A few months later, in the reshuffling of the early Covid era, I received an out-of-the-blue inquiry from Benjamin Hochman for a new piece. Zoom discussions about our shared musical interests clarified the mission: A set of canonic miniatures for solo piano, each of which (I later decided) would be somehow linked to my newly adopted (but also ancestral) home in Sicily.
The goal of Palermo Canons is to extend the definition of what a canon — a snippet of music repeated at a prescribed time interval — can be. Spingere (“Push”) presents a quick version of a converging canon, where two voices drive at different speeds towards a point of alignment. Tirare (“Pull”) teases counterpoint and chords out of a single rapid descent. In Convex Mirror, voices move inward and outward in reflected patterns but warped rhythms, like distortions in curved glass.
Broken Tiles started as an homage to Ligeti, with a wonky moto perpetuo ostinato and canonic interjections in registral extremes. Cilindro invokes the music of the marionette shows at the Opera dei Pupi: hand-churned barrel pianos with wild dips in tempo. Material cycles then disappears in a process of elimination as the dense starting texture is revealed to be a single canonic line wrapped around the slowing cylinder.
The cycle is bookended by transcriptions of the bells from the Palermo cathedral, in two versions: the ordinary chime of four bells — each tolling at its own speed — and the feast day version with six bells, here transcribed from a recording made on January 6, 2021 in the calm of quarantine, hours before the storming of the Capitol.
Palermo Canons was commissioned by and dedicated to Benjamin Hochman, with support from the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, where the work received its full premiere on September 12, 2024.