"3 preludes to missing the point" is my contribution to an ambitious project created by and for my friend Nicola Melville. After pooling considerable resources, Nikki commissioned several short piano pieces from several American composers - both known and unknown - with the main criterion being that each effort should clearly reflect a popular American style(s). In that spirit, I chose three popular styles for 3 short character pieces: a funk feel couched in a reduced theme & variations form for "It Gets Complicated"; an improvisational keyboard style that typically accompanies preachers and choirs in the Southern Baptist Church for "Gospel", and for "Eine Kinda Bachmusik, pt.2"; a dark and smoky jazz style, based on portions of J.S. Bach's Fugue no. 22 in B-flat minor, BWV867 from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I.
The rather unusual title comes from Sabbaths Theater by Philip Roth, which I was reading at the time of composition. Among the authors many beautifully crafted passages, I found one particularly captivating fragment in which the main character - Mickey Sabbath - contemplates the notion of a ruined life. He [Sabbath] observed that an unaccountable exaggeration of significance occurs when the ruined life in
question is his own and that exaggeration invariably becomes a prelude to missing the point. Though it has nothing to do with the actual music itself, I couldn't resist the opportunity to make a play on words, taking prelude to mean a musical
introduction AND - given the nature of our times - using it as a metaphor for the direction of spirituality & humanity here in the U.S. and around the world.
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