This talk was delivered to the composers at Eastman in a composition forum in 2004. It is a talk with didactic aspects about a piece that was written both to teach and to please. I spend some time revealing many intracompositional references. In this I have ambivalence, since I’d prefer the listener or performer to discover such references on his or her own. The references are to other twelvetone pieces by other composers. References to tonal music would have to be translations across different musical languages, except in the case of quotation, which rarely occurs in the music I have written since 1976, when I completed my trilogy of acculturation pieces. Yet, intercompositional references also abound in my music, due to the nature of the twelve-tone system and other contemporary tonal languages that have arisen or been invented in the last eighty or so years. Such systems permit communality.

At the talk’s end, I mention a function for music that has been lost in the sociological changes attending music as it has become mediated by recordings, television, and the World Wide Web. Before these media were available, many people played music in their homes for their own pleasure, and there was a considerable market for piano pieces, especially, that were designed for amateurs and young people to play. Schubert, Chopin, and Brahms wrote waltzes and other occasional pieces for this audience, and in the twentieth century we have Bartók’s For Children, his set of arrangements of Hungarian folk music, and other pieces based on all kinds of Eastern European folk music.

Many of my piano pieces have an intimate character, even if they are quite difficult to play. Such intimacy may be stirring, even radical, but it is devoid of any rhetorical passages that are mainly designed to impress the listener or show off the performer. I assume Morton Feldman’s attempt to purge his own music of what he called “compositional rhetoric” was a similar move. I might even go as far as to say that this music of intimacy is the opposite of some film music, which, as Aaron Copland once said, works best when one is not attending to it.