With this fourth volume titled Summer Moon, the American Piano Music series takes a new direction.

​

The first three albums were built around seven composers, with three works by each. Beginning here, I wanted to cast the net much wider: twenty compositions by twenty different American composers. The result is less a collection of individual portraits than a journey across the extraordinary range of American piano music itself.

​

The music spans more than ninety years, from Bix Beiderbecke’s Flashes, written in 1931, to Michael Torke’s Chancel from 2023. Along the way are works rooted in ragtime, jazz, spirituals, folk music, minimalism, modern classical traditions, and forms inherited from nineteenth-century Europe and transformed by American composers into something distinctly their own.

​

Some of these composers—Philip Glass, Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber, Florence Price—have become central figures in American music. Others remain known primarily to specialists or within particular musical communities. That contrast is part of what interests me. I have never thought of American piano music as a single tradition. It is a collection of traditions, constantly overlapping and influencing one another.

​

There are intimate miniatures here alongside virtuoso showpieces; music written for children’s theater alongside works drawn from African American spirituals; contemporary ragtime beside freely improvised jazz. What connects them is simply that each piece, for one reason or another, made me want to sit down at the piano and play it.

​

I hope this album encourages listeners to make some discoveries of their own.