Seven Regressions

Jake Berran

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2024

19 min.

Piano

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Program Notes: Program Note: What I mean by "regression" is twofold. First is the colloquial sense; I reach back to my own childhood and childhood–evoking music for influence, and I let the sounds in my head run wild a little longer than usual before starting to clean up the form and structure. The way I treat the resulting material is regressive in a second statistical sense. In the same way one can use a line or other simple equation to model complicated real-world data—a process called regression—I sought to draw a "line of best fit" through disparate elements, maintaining the musical flow and smoothing out otherwise jerky juxtaposition. In the first movement, a crashing storm dissipates, leaving behind a soft push and pull between descending chromatic melodies and rising Moonlight Sonata arpeggios. The second movement starts playful and strophic but gently succumbs to a single gesture. The third movement loosely takes its opening harmony and melody (and tempo instruction) from the pop tune Someone Like You by Adele, one of my childhood best friend's favorite artists. The fourth movement is structured like club dance music, mixing "long-short" jig rhythms, the "long-long-short" tresillo rhythm (originally from sub-Saharan Africa and commonly associated with Latin American music due to the transatlantic slave trade), and an imagined "long-long-long-short" beat in the drop. Its tension and release techniques pull from both classical harmony and electronic dance music. The fifth movement is fumbling and awkward within a strict rhythmic grid—maybe the morning after the dance—and serves as a harmonic prelude to the polyphonic flow of the sixth movement. There, a simple, unchanging melody is repeated, while scalar gusts of wind bring contrapuntal debris until everything is swept away. The seventh movement, almost entirely monophonic, is a reconstructed history of the first six movements. Specifically, a collection of fragments are pieced together into a perpetual-motion chaconne on the chord progression from Tiësto's Elements Of Life, a track emblematic of my teenage obsession with trance music (a longer-form subgenre of electronic dance music focused on gradual build and release). As a single continuous line which tries to make sense of its past, the seventh movement is a microcosm of the work as a whole. In the end, the music veers off into its first truly tenebrous texture, but turns its inner turmoil into newfound strength.
Recording Notes: Recorded 12/17/2024 Duncan Recital Hall The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University Houston, TX, U.S.A.
Ensemble Name: Jake Berran, piano