Piano Solo - Digital Download SKU: A0.1025147 Composed by Kirk O'Riordan. 20th Century,Contemporary. Score. 71 pages. Kirk O'Riordan #4357421. Published by Kirk O'Riordan (A0.1025147). Twenty-six Preludeswas composed for Holly Roadfeldt between September 2013 and April 2014. Unlike the famous preludes by composers like Bach, Chopin, and Debussy, mine are not organized by key. Instead, they are organized by threads: compositional ideas that are developed over the course of the entire set. Composing the set in this manner allowed me to develop several ideas concurrently with the idea that they would in some way merge together by the end of the set, giving the several disparate ideas a real reason to exist together in the same set. In addition, because I was not using key as a resource, I was not constrained by the number 24. The end result is a cycle of preludes that is in some ways more closely related to a Schubertian song cycle than to the Preludes of Chopin, Bach, or Debussy. That is not to say that there is not a close conceptual connection with the Preludes of those masters (there are subtle references to each of those composers in the score), but my intention was to treat the Preludes in a cyclical fashion rather than, as is the case with Bach and Chopin, an exploration of the nuances of the 24 keys. The preludes were not composed in the order that they are presented. Some of them came in quick bunches: two or three in a day; others took longer. In addition to developing the compositional threads, I was interested in creating a wide range of moods that also held together as a set. Overall, the moods become more intense as the set unfolds.The premiere performance was given by Holly Roadfeldt on November 18, 2014 at the University at Albany. Approximate Duration: 46 minutesHolly Roadfeldt's recording of Twenty-Six Preludes can be found on her CD The Preludes Project (Ravello Records).
