Prayers from a Slowly Remembered Past

ensemble piano and soft synth
written summer 2026
duration 9-10 minutes

for Eunbi Kim, with admiration and appreciation

program notes

When I think of the piano, I remember nights from my childhood spent sitting at a cheap Pearl River upright, eyes watering with frustration as I stumbled through dutiful Hanon exercises and Beethoven sonatas. At the time, I mostly felt resentment; now, I look back with an odd mix of nostalgia, gratitude, and wistfulness. I had no way of knowing how essential the piano would be in determining the course of my life - how could I have? And yet, there were moments even then - when a tough passage would click, when I figured out how to play a tune by ear, when I improvised accompaniment that worked better than expected - that made me pray I’d get to do music for the rest of my life.

In 2025, visionary pianist Eunbi Kim reached out to me about creating a new work for her inspired by themes of home, memory, and the immigrant experience. It seemed almost too obvious that it should be an exploration of our relationships with the piano. We both had complicated emotions toward the instrument, but we both also admitted that it since gave us the lives we now lead.

There are essentially two pianos in this piece: one, the actual acoustic instrument, and two, sampled sounds of a muffled, detuned, upright, performed on a MIDI keyboard. The first represents the present day; the second, memories of the past. The two intermingle in dreamy fashion; where the acoustic piano introduces material that represents my current musical language, the detuned upright often calls back to Scriabin’s Sonata-Fantasie No. 2, a formative piece for Eunbi. It was a real joy writing this piece for her, and I am grateful for her creative generosity and care.