Note: This piece has been reorchestrated into a work for
wind band.
I originally wrote
Pipe Dreams specifically for the 2009 Drury Composer's Recital, as I knew my senior seminar piece would not be completed in time. It started out as a piece for solo piano before it was realized that the piece would work really well with percussion.
Pipe Dreams is an amalgamation of several different ideas that came together gradually. The rhythmic section that begins the first and third movements was an experiment with accents that I originally wrote in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The main melody in these two movements came to me as I was walking to class one day in January, and existed as a post-it note on my desk for two months. It took roughly this long to discover the best way to notate this melody was in alternating bars of 6/8 and 3/4. The material of the second movement began as an exercise with transitions from tonic to flat VI. The combination of these elements eventually worked themselves into
Pipe Dreams.
Pipe Dreams means a vain hope, which adequately describes my life while writing and orchestrating this piece. The three movements were subsequently titled Fantastic Notions, Castles in the Sky, and Delusions of Grandeur to play on this theme.
