Passing Through, Staying Put (2011)
for piano trio [6:20]

Passing Through, Staying Put is a piece split into two parts — like the novel from which it takes its title (Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi) or the city of its premiere, Nicosia. The first half (Passing Through) is all about motion and change; a long chain of consonant four-note piano chords—calculated in OpenMusic to correspond to a set of meticulous voice-leading principles—unfolds throughout the piece, while snippets of material in the strings move in and out of phase in chiasma patterns inspired by Nancarrow. The second part (Staying Put) by contrast deals with settling and stasis, a sense of arrival…