Two birds, one cadenza

A day after my last post, I completely changed my mind about what to do for a new piece to record for grant applications. I was looking through my Chaos materials and was thinking that maybe I should write a piano piece. (But wait a moment...) The largest missing section of Chaos is actually a large piano cadenza. Granted, I was almost up to the point where the piano stopped playing alone, but I thought, "Why not compose the cadenza as a separate piano piece and then take the best parts and use them in the concerto?"

That idea didn't last long. It meant writing a whole new piece, which was something that I wanted to avoid. Rather than compose a whole lot of music that I wouldn't ultimately use (something I have done a lot in the past 20 years), I decided to go ahead and write that missing cadenza and the accompanying instruments in a chamber version, then re-score the rest of the middle movement for that ensemble, using the instruments I knew I would have available to record it. All I would have to do would be write a beginning for the ensemble - which I may adapt from another "beginning" that I have never used, but really like, for a piece provisionally named At the Ends of a Double Rainbow. It's just the right length, and I could easily adapt the pitch material to lead into the beginning of the second movement of Chaos, then bring back some of the free stuff as the accompaniment to the freer portion of the concerto cadenza. Not only would it be a strong opening, but a source of material for later in the movement. Not only that, it's almost the identical instrumentation to what I had planned for the chamber version of the movement.

That all ought to give me a substantial movement of 8-10 minutes for piano and chamber ensemble, which I will probably call Chaos Theory, more from its derivation from the Chaos source material than actually Chaos Theory, although this piece will have had a fractal development. First, a wind ensemble piece, then a piano concerto, incorporating a piano cadenza and a chamber orchestra piece. Hopefully, it won't accumulate more, as this giant snowball continues downhill, since I had already planned to use At the Ends of a Double Rainbow as part of a second piano concerto with a chamber orchestra. I can't use the same movement in two piano concertos - can I?

NO.

Let's see what I come up with when I continue working on it today.