comparison is the thief of joy

twenty-two pieces for piano

Duration: circa 45 minutes

dedicated to my dear friend, Frances, Magdalene Wilson

There is no programmatic intention in what unfolds as sound in this piece: any or no relationship to the title and the sounding music is forged at the discretion of the composer, performer and listener. Despite this statement, an unfolding of material manifests through contrasting music sections to provide the listener with a sonic experience. It is the interplay between and within these sections that is the narrative content of the composition.

This piece’s material stems from another set of piano pieces written a few months before titled four inventions for Lauryna (April 2023). Feeling there was more to come from those materials, I self-borrowed and transformed them further. Through the processes used, the resulting compositions developed several vague and distorted references to other music I had known in the past. Those references were never blatant, nor would they necessarily be audible to everyone, but to my ear, there was a distanced familiarity. Rather than destroy these traces, I travelled with them to see where they might lead. What results are the twenty- two pieces collected here.

Designed to be performed as a single work, each part can, in principle at least, be performed as a free-standing entity if required, although the endings of some of the pieces are designed to flow into the next.
comparison is the thief of joy is dedicated to my dear friend and colleague, Francis Magdalene Wilson.