San Francisco Conservatory of Music

Faculty Artist Recital

February 6, 2026

Program Notes

This program is built around musical pairings. Each pair consists of a piano solo followed by a more substantial chamber work in a similar compositional style or emotional space. Prelude: 

Etude No. 1: “Medieval Induction” program note by Marc Mellits

“Etude No. 1: Medieval Induction” was a gift to a good friend of mine. The day his first child was born, I hung the newly finished Etude on his front door. The music embodies overlapping strata of rhythm, layering and combining, forming a unified, rapid-firing whole that represents the best of all elements that started its formation.” 

PAIR 1:  JUNCTION

Etude No. 2 by Don Byron + Road Movies by John Adams 

These pieces exist at a crossroads of genres. New Yorker critic Alex Ross writes, “Adams mapped fragments of Romantic harmony onto the electric grid of minimalism.” Meanwhile, Byron’s music pursues what he calls “sound above genre,” drawing on jazz, classical, and avant-garde styles. Both pieces are built on propulsive minimalist patterns while other elements whiz past, including jazz-inflected chord progressions, gospel harmonies at warp speed, and fleeting quotations from other late–20th-century classical works. 

Etude No. 2 opens with a minimalist eighth-note pattern, which is joined by a jazz chord progression in a different meter. The left hand stays faithful to the rhythmic pattern while the right hand toggles between the chords and the eighth notes. Sometimes the lines line up tidily, and other times they result in a playful canon. This burst of activity unfolds in about a minute and a half. 

Road Movies program note from John Adams: 

“The title "Road Movies" is total whimsy, probably suggested by the groove in the piano part. Movement I is a relaxed drive down a not unfamiliar road. Material is recirculated in a sequence of recalls that suggest a rondo form. Movement II is a simple meditation of several small motives. A solitary figure in a empty desert landscape. Movement III is for four wheel drives only, a big perpetual motion machine called ‘40% Swing’. On modern MIDI sequencers the desired amount of swing can be adjusted with almost ridiculous accuracy. 40% provides a giddy, bouncy ride.” 

PAIR 2: ECHO 

Für Alina by Arvo Pärt + A Boy and a Makeshift Toy by Mary Koujoumdjian

These works share an emotional landscape rather than a compositional style. They are introspective pieces that hold space for tenderness toward a child in the midst of grief and upheaval.

Für Alina is Arvo Pärt’s first work in his spare and simple tintinnabuli (“bell-like”) style. The score has no time signature, and the notes on the page consist of whole notes and stemless noteheads. Pärt’s performance instructions are “Calm, exalted, listening to one’s inner self.” Für Alina is named after the daughter of a close friend whose family was separated by the Iron Curtain. While named after the daughter, it was meant as an offering of comfort to the mother missing her child.

A Boy and a Makeshift Toy program note by Mary Koujoumdjian:

“Inspired by the work of American Pulitzer-nominated war photographer Chris Hondros, who captured images of children in wars around the world, the Children of Conflict series is a collection of my own sonic portraits based on Hondros’ intimately revealing photography with hopes to continue the storytelling and dialogue his work prompts.

“A Boy and a Makeshift Toy” is a portrait of a young boy playing in an abandoned train station, full of Albanian refugees, waiting to be taken to another camp. During an 11-week bombing campaign in 1999, Serbians displaced more than 800,000 Albanians out of Kosovo.”

PAIR 3: A MIGHTY FORTRESS 

Frederic Rzewski and Julius Eastman use musical form to address social struggle. These pieces push the piano (and the pianist) to the physical limits of the instrument through steadfast repetition that accumulates into massive walls of sound. Within this uproar, each piece repurposes a simple melody to convey a message of struggle and hope.

Rzewski is best known for his overtly political works The People United Will Never Be Defeated! and Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, which directly quote folk and protest melodies. By comparison, Piano Piece No. 4 is more concentrated and abstract. Its material swings between extremes: traversing the keyboard in cascades with dynamic swells from ppp to fff, dissonant twelve-tone rows which gradually clear into a dance-like pentatonic melody that pianist David Burge called “a folk song waiting to be born,” then collapsing again into a violent, quasi-improvisatory section. These contrasts are often heard as a journey between order and disorder, oppression and struggle, or what happens when many voices organize or unravel.

Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla was composed in 1979, the year of the Stonewall riots. It is a radical, open-scored work which exemplifies the composer’s fearless self-expression as a Black, gay composer working in a culture hostile to his identity. Eastman’s confrontational titles, as well as accounts of his provocative performances, force the classical-concert-going audience to reflect on race and sexuality. As he explained, “These names, either I glorify them, or they glorify me.” Beginning with a slow and even pulse in a minor harmony, the piece unfolds according to Eastman’s self-described “organic music” technique (think gradual and additive), as harmonies arise and dissolve in ever-growing, towering waves. At last, near the conclusion of the piece, these waves break into Martin Luther’s 1527 hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” intended as a reclaimed anthem of resistance: “For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe.” As with all composed music, there is no one correct interpretation. This work’s  large scale, pace, tension, and highly charged musical quotation are yours to engage with.