1 movement. 6-7 minutes.
Lekcja was written in 1992 in memory of my father's cousin, Anna Kowalska Bley, who was a distinguished pianist and teacher in western New York State. Bley was a lifelong interpreter and teacher of the work of Chopin, and this is reflected in Lekcja, which draws its musical material from twenty of the fifty-eight Chopin mazurkas. Like my more flamboyant fakebook, Lekcja is a Janus-faced work that looks both forward and backward. Anyone who has strolled within earshot of a musical rehearsal building or theater will have had an experience akin to this Piano Lesson: snatches of warhorses from the classical repertoire fade in and out, overlaid by the disjunct soundtrack of contemporary postindustrial streetlife. In the case of Piano Lesson, hundreds of shards of musical phrases, mostly transitional in nature, remain recognizably Chopinesque but end up being oddly inaccessible to the listener after being recast into a new format whose logic simultaneously confirms and contradicts the music's original function. The surface of Lekcja is smooth to the point of sounding decorative, but it masks an aggressive exploration of the fringes of musical perception.
Lekcja gry na fortepiane, akord Chopin was premiered by Joseph Kubera at the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York in June, 1993. A recording by the composer is available on the Einstein Records CD Gringo Blaster.
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Demo:
