Featured in this album are nine highly attractive and approachable piano pieces by American composers. Max Lifchitz introduced them to New York audiences as part of public events sponsored by North/South Consonance, Inc.

The featured compositions espouse a postmodern attitude erasing boundaries between the past and the present while alluding to relevant cultural contexts. Wide-ranging in style, the composers represented on this disc embrace apparent contradictions while finding inspiration in various traditions, cultures and nature.

Born in Seattle, WA, Brian Robert Banks studied at the Peabody Institute, the San Francisco Conservatory, and the University of California at Berkeley. His music has been featured at numerous venues in the U.S. and Mexico, including the Foro Internacional de Música Nueva Manuel Enríquez in Mexico City, as well as the Velia and Oregon Bach Festivals. In 1996, Banks received a Fulbright Scholar award for research and teaching in Mexico bringing about his appointment as Professor of Music and Composer-in-Residence at the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, Mexico.

Piano Sonata No. 4 is in three movements. The first marked Energico, is based on an ostinato pattern of 12 notes (7 + 5 eighth notes). It starts off with a thin texture increasing to big, fat 8-note chords and rich harmonies that come from the world of jazz. Risoluto, the second movement, presents a heterorhythmic type of two voice counterpoint - where its contours change from rhythms that never match up to some rhythmic unisons at the moments of greatest climactic intensity. The movement combines the Lydian and Dorian modes using an unusual key signature: B-flat, E-flat and D-flat, and using E-flat as main tonal center. A guided improvisatory cadenza, based on previously heard material helps transform the subject of the second movement to the third. The final movement is a light-in-mood Andantino despite some slight interruptions that attempt to steer the narrative toward something more serious. An epigraph from the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho summarizes what Banks wanted to accomplish musically in the work:

Journeying through the world,
To and fro, to and fro,
Cultivating a small field.

Harry T. Bulow has had a distinguished career as a composer, saxophonist and arts administrator. His style is eclectic in approach and broad in its appeal. He is at home working in jazz, concert, film and sacred music. In 2009 he was appointed Head of the Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Visual and Performing Arts at Purdue University. Trained at San Diego State University and the University of California, Los Angeles, his mentors included Henry Mancini, Henri Lazarof and Aaron Copland. Bulow’s works have been performed by among others, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Eastman Wind Ensemble, and the San Antonio, Omaha, and Honolulu Symphony Orchestras.

Mixed Motives is full of oomph, catchy rhythms and vitality. The buoyant work blends elements of minimalism and jazz. In three distinct sections, the peaceful lyrical middle episode is framed by kinetic and vivacious opening and closing sections.

Joseph Rivers served as the J. Donald Feagin Professor of Music and Film Studies at The University of Tulsa before relocating to Italy at the end of 2022. His compositional projects display an interest in storytelling through music and encompass music for the concert hall, stage, and film. A graduate of the University of South Carolina and the University of Arizona, he also studied film music composition at New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles. His choral and instrumental works have been performed throughout the US, Ukraine and Europe.

Eminently lyrical and evocative, the music of Notturno for the Piano Left Hand is pictorial in nature tempting the listener to imagine a lush romantic legend with a very mellifluous feel. A virtuosic tour de force, the piece was commissioned by the Signature Symphony of Tulsa, OK to function as an encore piece for Maurice Ravel's masterful Concerto for the Left Hand. This recording of Notturno was made possible with a grant from The University of Tulsa.

Born in Germany, Alexander Semmler (1900-1977) studied with Gustav Jenner – Johannes Brahms’ only composition pupil. After relocating to New York in 1928 he was hired as conductor and pianist for the newly formed CBS Symphony, a position he held for ten years. As music director for the RKO-Pathe film company during the 1940’s, he provided musical scores for hundreds of motion pictures, radio programs and eventually, television episodes. In the early 1950’s he returned to Germany to head West Berlin’s Radio in the American Sector before traveling to Mexico to establish the Centro de Compositores Mexicanos. From 1954 until 1969 he served as program director of the Maverick Concert Series in Woodstock, NY.

Fleeting Moments Op. 48 is a set of three contrasting, quasi-improvisatory pieces. Semmler’s lucid musical language employs clearly shaped contrapuntal melodic lines that merge traditional harmonies with free atonality. The first piece opens with a mellow melody that grows into a dramatic climax before fading into a serene ending. The second, built around two distinct melodies is a modern reworking of the Baroque two-part invention. A capricious scherzo concludes the set. The late Iliana Semmler – the composer’s daughter and a University at Albany colleague – introduced me to these most idiomatic and effective piano pieces.

Elizabeth Bell (1928 - 2016) attended Wellesley College and The Juilliard School where she studied with Vittorio Giannini and Peter Mennin. Described by the American Record Guide as “one of our country’s leading composers” and by Fanfare Magazine as “a fine composer whose instrumental music is particularly striking,” her works for voice, solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra, have been performed throughout the US and abroad. One of the founders of New York Women Composers, Inc., she also served for five years on the Board of Governors of American Composers Alliance. Concerning the work that appears on this recording Ms. Bell writes:

“Summer Suite is a collection of pieces meant to evoke my memories of scenes from various summers in my life. Tempo of Apollo is about an ancient temple in Pompeii, which I visited during a trip to Europe. Brilliant white columns against the vivid blue of the sky, roses blooming in the ruins of that wonderful lost civilization. Housatonic describes a swift-flowing New England River: sunlight sparkling on the ice-cold water, rocks making eddies in the racing current. Sangre de Cristo suggests my reaction, to my first sight of the beautiful mountain range in New Mexico. The jagged peaks caught my imagination by their lonely grandeur as they shone with the bloody rays of the setting sun -- personifying their name, “Blood of Christ”. Tappan Zee is about the widest point in the Hudson River, our beautiful river with palisades in the distance, white sails and soaring gulls; and about the bridge which spans it in a graceful arching curve; filled with bustling traffic night and day.”

A native of Moline, Illinois Marilyn J. Ziffrin (1926-2018) was educated at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and at Columbia University in New York. Her composition mentors included Alexander Tcherepnin and Karl Ahrendt. She received commissions from among others, the New Hampshire Music Festival, the American Guild of Organists, the Hope College Concert Choir and the Concord Chorale. Her many awards included the 2007 Lotte Jacobi Living Treasure New Hampshire Governor Art Award and the 1972 Delius Composition Award. Also active as a writer, she authored a much-acclaimed biography of the distinguished American composer Carl Ruggles published by the University of Illinois Press.

Piano Sonata No. 2 employs a lyrical, down-to-earth musical language. The music typifies how the press described Ziffrin’s style as “as having a peculiarly American sound: lean, direct, tonal and sometimes jazzy.” The work’s three contrasting movements follow the traditional fast-slow-fast design, and each is built around clearly discernible ternary (A-B-A) patterns.

The American Record Guide referred to Max Lifchitz as “one of America’s finest exponents of contemporary piano music.” The New York Times praised him for his "clean, measured and sensitive performances.” A graduate of The Juilliard School and Harvard University, Lifchitz was awarded first prize in the 1976 International Gaudeamus Competition for Performers of 20th Century Music held in Holland. As a composer, Lifchitz has received fellowships from, among others, the ASCAP, Ford, and Guggenheim Foundations; the Individual Artists Program of the NYS Council of the Arts; and from the National Endowment for the Arts. His works have been performed throughout Europe, Latin America, and the US.

Lonesome Tears is a lament for those lives lost during the recent Covid pandemic. Written while in forced isolation, the plaintive music mourns, honors, and commemorates the lives of the many relatives, friends and colleagues who departed this world because of the wide-ranging health crisis. In three contrasting but interrelated movements, the music evokes feelings of uncertainty, rage and deep sorrow.

Is Spring Right? was written in response to evolving changes in the earth’s climate as well as the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in late February of 2022. Throughout the work snippets from Stravinsky’s The Right of Spring are altered and juxtaposed with echoes of the Ukrainian National Anthem. The somewhat sinister character of the music reflects the fact that it is a work for the left hand alone. All told, sinister manus (sinister hand) means left hand in Latin.

B. Allen Schulz is the great grandson of Chicago jazzman and vaudeville performer, Ollie Powers. A graduate of Wabash College and the City University of NY, His honors include the John Cage Prize in Experimental Music, and a special mention from the University of Oregon Waging Peace Through Singing choral competition. He has received commissions from a diverse group of choral and instrumental ensembles and his works have been played throughout the US. Schulz is the founder of Random Access Music and the annual Queens New Music Festival active since 2012.

Jade Dance may be thought of as a stylistic meeting between Conlon Nancarrow and Scott Joplin, each sitting at opposing ends of the piano: Joplin on the left and Nancarrow on the right. Throughout the piece the left-hand employs a simple "stride piano" or boogie-woogie technique while the right-hand struggles wildly to play large skips, wide reaches, extensive runs and a cascade of notes in diverse meters. The music recalls the mechanical, "wind-up" nature of a player piano. After the machine stubbornly plays the same ideas over and over, it begins to careen out of control and eventually begins to breakdown. The breakdown is thorough and complete -- resulting in the absolute silencing of the instrument. But after a few tense seconds, and a few aborted tries, the machine struggles back to life and resolutely plays its one motive one last time before it is silent for good!