Five Piano Haiku

solo piano

The Five Piano Haiku were written while I was temporarily a graduate student at the University of Illinois, in the mid-1970s, for my friends Jan Cameron and Gary Schmidt. The pieces were premiered by them on a series of students concerts we did. Gary Schmidt later wrote a set of piano variations on them, but, to my knowledge, they have not been played for some twenty years after that. A few years ago, I recopied them (with the assistance of David Fuqua) for the present edition.

These pieces each take a seventeen syllable phrase from the Torah (though in English), and "set" it to some formal transcription of the harmonic series. In a way, each of these haiku is a kind of study for any number of my subsequent works which use the "form" of the harmonic series as a basic formal principle for the piece.

LP (February, 1999)

Lebanon, NH