This intermediate solo piano work was jointly commissioned by Utah Music Teachers Association and Music Teachers National Association in 2025. It was premiered on October 24, 2025 in Lehi, Utah. The following video features Tanner Jorden.
ABOUT THE PIECE
Writing an intermediate piano piece has been a happy challenge because it has reminded me of when I was a young (and intermittently diligent) piano student. I thought of young Andrew as I wrote. What would I have loved to play back then? What do I wish I would have known or what would I tell my younger self?
Musically, the three short movements of this piece simply explore material I think young Andrew would have enjoyed playing.
The first movement is based on bluesy canon. We hear the theme first in octaves, in both hands, and then in canon. If it had a key signature, it would have one sharp and one flat—a sound called the "acoustic scale," which is a concept I wish I had encountered much earlier, and which Bartók introduces to young musicians without hesitation in Mikrokosmos. This movement also shifts between simple and compound meters (always with a constant eighth note), since hearing-feeling "short beats" (groups of two) and "long beats" (groups of three) becomes useful in making sense of groove, jazz, and so much other exciting music. It's also full of fun riffs, scales, chord voicings, and alternating LH-RH patterns that I'm pretty sure young Andrew would have loved.
The second movement has a modal flavor. It wasn't until I started playing Debussy and jazz that I realized there were magical (modal) lands between the major and minor scales I encountered in Hanon, for example. The sparse counterpoint in this movement invites the pianist and listener to hear-feel the modal "tendencies" of each interior line and also introduces techniques like planing.
The last movement reminds young Andrew that the piano is, indeed, a percussion instrument. Drummers recognize the opening rhythmic pattern as a paradiddle, and I wish young Andrew had learned drum rudiments along with piano technique to solidify a deep, internal time-feel and sense of groove. (I'm still working on that.) This movement also turns "scale" into "walking bass," and plays with extremes in range (every pianist wants an excuse to play that low B♭!) and in dynamics.
Finally, if I could tell young Andrew something, I'd say: be where you are; pay attention; and lift where you stand. In any age, but especially in the "attention economy" (i.e., the distraction economy) and the era of digital everything, it's easy to be anywhere but where we actually are, robbed of our attention, and thus our ability to offer the good the world needs from us. Playing and writing music cultivates our capacity for attention, which is its own reward and which leads to many others.
—Andrew Maxfield, 2025
Special thanks to Dr. Carmen Hall for providing the fingerings featured in this edition.