Piano Suite #1 is a set of four short pieces for solo piano. They grew out of advice from my composition teacher at Stanford, Giancarlo Aquilanti: spend half an hour at the piano every day and write something — anything. After a year you will have many small pieces, most of them poor, a few with ideas worth developing, and one or two that might stand on their own. These four are what stood on their own. (The optimistic “#1” still awaits a sequel.)

The first, in A minor and 6/8 time, opens with a theme of octave leaps stepping chromatically downward. This figure gives way to a more flowing idea in moving thirds, and then returns to the opening material, now with the right hand spinning sixteenth notes above the left hand. A brief coda closes in A minor.

The second, marked Allegro ma molto legato in 3/4, falls into two verses. In the first (C major), the left hand sings a melody in two voices while the right hand showers eighth-note decoration over it. A short bridge shifts the mood to C minor and reverses the roles. The right hand now takes the minor-altered melody, over the left hand’s running eighths. A crescendo and sharp accents drive the piece to the close, with a long trill resolving onto a booming, open C chord.

The third piece (complete in the audio clip below) is a dancing 5/8 in G-flat major, marked Allegretto. I conceived it for harp or piano, so I chose a key that lies gracefully under a harpist’s hands. Over arpeggiated chords in the left hand, the right hand plays a lilting tune, forte, giving way to a softer middle section of similar character. A single bar of 6/8 offers a subito piano echo of the cadence. The opening material then returns enhanced: the same melody, but now the left hand adds a countermelody of its own among the arpeggios. The music stays forte until a final diminuendo and a long G-flat arpeggio.

The fourth, Allegretto in D major and common time, plays throughout on the contrast between staccato and legato. Each hand supplies its own melody, forte, their articulations deliberately out of step. The melody repeats, the left hand busier now with moving eighths, before a crescendo opens a central section over a mostly legato eighth-note bass, the right hand thickening into chords as the dynamic keeps climbing. A brief return of the theme, marked poco allargando e marcato assai, launches the home stretch containing emphatic chords, tone clusters, and a deceptive cadence swerving to F-sharp major. A fortissimo close lands on a giant D-major chord, punctuated by an offset, booming bass.

The perusal score contains the first page of all four pieces. The audio sample is the complete third piece, which begins on page 3 of the PDF.