16 June 2009

Brand-New Music, West Coast Division

A piano trio composed by Garrett Shatzer, and recently premiered.



Garret's program notes:

Garrett Ian Shatzer (b. 1980, Detroit, MI) is a first-year graduate student at UC Davis. Holding degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Miami, he has also had the privilege of studying in Paris, Rome, and Buenos Aires. After concentrating on popular electronic music for many years, his focus is now exclusively on acoustic compositions. Aside from writing for the concert hall, he has also written music for films, dance clubs, rock and metal bands, hip hop MCs, modern dancers, and theater productions.

I am increasingly interested in the process of reharmonization and reinterpretation of musical events. In Piano Trio No. 1, I explore these in two large-scale ways. First, I use the opening gesture to reach two distinctly different sections of music, contrasted via harmony, dynamics, and tempo. Second, I investigate the functional possibilities of the common harmonies within the two main key areas of the piece, B minor and F minor. My musical idiom has been described as “tonal but not really tonal” due to my conflicting uses of tertian harmonies in both functional and non-functional ways, and this piece is no different.

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