Hope you enjoy this first collection of pieces - and sorry for the simple state of this page, one day I'll get around to adding in the rest of my compositions and sprucing it up. Thanks for listening!

To give you some background on these pieces, they were written over quite a few years, many while I was a music student studying at the University of Michigan, School of Music. In fact, the Invention in C Major is basically a study piece in Baroque music, and it is highly based on the the "C Major Invention" by Bach.

I wrote the second piece, the Sarabande, a couple of years later, when I returned to composition after a break. A Sarabande is also a form of music from the Baroque era that is a dance in triple time. My Sarabande should show some degree of evolution in my composition skills over the Invention, as I learned many new techniques in counterpoint and composition between the two.

As for the Passacaglia, I wrote this during my studies in orchestration (there is also an orchestral version for this that hasn't been recorded yet). It is also a study piece based very closely to Bach's masterwork, his Passacaglia in C minor.

The pianist in these pieces is Jason Bednarz. He studied piano performance at the University of Michigan as well. He is a wonderful pianist and was one of my piano teachers. These recordings were performed by him at the Faber Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2009.


Learn more about the pieces:

For those who would like to better appreciate these pieces, only a small amount of information is needed to hear them like a Classical musician would. For the first piece, the Invention in C Major, it is written in the style of the Baroque era (the era right before Mozart). Pieces from the Baroque are quite often "polyphonic" in their character. This simply means these pieces are written for multiple voices even though they might be played by just one instrument.

So for the Invention, even though this piece was written for just one instrument, the piano, when you listen to it, try to listen as if it were written for two instruments or singers (for instance, a soprano and a tenor). As you listen, you may be able to hear each of them working off each other, often the higher voice presenting a phrase, and then the lower voice responding with the same phrase. Sometimes they work separately in this call-and-echo type fashion, and other times, they work together.

To expand on the call and echo further, it's helpful to understand the structure an an Invention. The meaning of the word Invention in Baroque musical-forms is "idea," and what it does is present a small theme (or melody) right at the beginning. This small musical phrase is the "idea." So if you listen to the beginning of this Invention, right away you'll hear this small theme being played all alone in the higher voice. Then right after this, this theme is passed to the lower voice and played there again.

And as the piece progresses, this theme is replayed over and over again, handed back and forth between the two voices, but often the theme is changed and varied as it is passed. It's played with, where some of the notes of the theme are slightly changed, or the theme is chopped down and only a part of it is used. So as you listen to the piece try to hear the theme as it gets modified as it makes it way through the piece.

As previously mentioned, I modeled this Invention very closely on the C Major Invention by J.S. Bach. If you listen to the two pieces, you may notice that structurally, they are nearly identical.


The Sarabande is also a piece written in the Baroque style, and everything that we talked about with the Invention also applies to the Sarabande: it's polyphonic nature (the Sarabande is also a two-voice piece written for one instrument, the keyboard), and also the concept of a small theme being presented in the beginning and being passed between the two voices - in the beginning of the Sarabande, this theme is immediately played in the upper voice, but unlike the Invention, it is not then followed by being played in the lower one. Instead, the upper voice repeats it, but this time, shifted just a little bit lower in pitch.

But, the two have major differences. The first one is that unlike the Invention, the Sarabande is a dance form, and the structure of its beats are in triple time. Triple time is what waltzes are written in and have a "down-up-up, down-up-up" quality to its rhythm. The second major difference is that the Sarabande is more free in its polyphony. It does not follow as strict a structure as to when the theme is handed back and forth between the two voices, the theme moving around more organically.

And, again, like the Invention, I had a model for the Sarabande: J.S. Bach's Sarabande in C minor from his Partita No.2 in C minor, BWV 827. But this time, I didn't follow this piece very strictly, using it mainly as a starting point. And, if you listen to the two, you may find they are most similar in the beginning, but seem to differ much more from that point on.

The Passacaglia is also a type of baroque music, and again, I modeled his Passacaglia on a piece by Bach - his amazing Passacaglia in C minor. And, to best listen to this piece, know that in a Passacaglia, there is a theme that’s played in the bass (you can hear it right away, played on its own). Then, this theme is played over and over again, but with variations over it. Keep trying to hear this bass theme as the variations are spun over it with increasing complexity and emotion.