Late Bloomer

Edmund Campion

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Duo

2019

19 min.

Piano

Program Notes: Late Bloomer, composed in 2019, is composed for piano 4-hand and was premiered and recorded by the brilliant pianists Marylyn Nonken and Manuel Laufer. Program Note: How would the history of piano literature have evolved if humans were born with four hands and twenty fingers instead of two hands and ten fingers? A four-handed twenty finger pianist can easily control the entire keyboard in a way to make all registers available at all times. In this piece, each key on the piano is a distinct "bell" set to ring at a specific time in and out phase with other "bells". From three to twelve canonic and polyphonic lines are collapsed into a single continuous line for each pianist. The piano keyboard defines its physical boundaries with a full cycle of the circle of fiths mapped from low to high. This design element presents the operative frequency range for music and is the playground for the Late Bloomer. The original premieres of the work featured a special resonance producing device built by Jeremy Wagner at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). The piece can be perfomed entirely without this special tool.
Recording Notes: Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley campus, 2019
Ensemble Name: Marilyn Nonken and Manuel Laufer (Piano 4-hand)