Fantasy Suite

Fantasy Suite is a sixteen-minute solo for just intonation piano in four movements — City of Brass, Pillars, Procession, and City of Gold — the outcome of a year-long undergraduate exploration of what microtonality had to offer, written in dialogue with a long-running love of fantasy literature. The piece is built on a piano scordatura: it is notated as it would be played on a standard piano, read in twelve-tone equal temperament, while the sounding pitches are retuned to custom just intonation scales. Pillars requires a MIDI processing plug-in (such as Reaper’s MIDI Chorderizer) to layer additional pitches above the performed note. Movements appear on the album Imaginary Keyboards on Bandcamp.

Movement Notes

City of Brass · City of Gold

The opening and closing movements are conceived as a pair — sister cities, one filled with mystery and the other with majesty. The original City of Brass comes from The Arabian Nights: an empty city with black walls and two Andalusian brass towers, filled with treasure and demons sealed away years ago.

Myths of golden cities have been shared throughout time; in my reading, the gold most often stands for prosperity in all its forms rather than for itself. Depictions of cities of gold tend to set waterfalls and lush plant life around the manufactured architecture. I enjoy the idea of gold as the symbol of prosperity rather than as the literal stuff.

Procession

A hero’s funeral inside an ornate cathedral. A life where death from old age was never expected. Past exploits of the deceased are shared between the living. At last the body is entombed. The piano is tuned in just intonation, root G♭.

Pillars

A place, alien. Massive white pillars extend into the deep purple sky beyond the edge of vision. What can be seen of the sky resembles how the Milky Way looked before city lights drowned it out. The piano is tuned close to the harmonic series.