"Phoenix" Triptych for piano
Digital Sheet Music

Piano Solo - Level 5 - Digital Download

SKU: A0.799405

Composed by Igor Korneitchouk. 20th Century,Contemporary. Score. 38 pages. Drake Mabry Productions #420115. Published by Drake Mabry Productions (A0.799405).

Triptych for Piano, "Phoenix" invokes the fabulous Arabian bird and emblem of immortality, who-after centuries of life-is consigned to the fire only to be reborn from the ashes in all the vigor of youth and beauty. The piece captures the life cycle of this celebrated rara avis in a triptych arrangement of three "panels." Entitled "Embers", the first movement depicts the transformative energy of a lively hearth fire throwing off sparks, erupting with sudden pops of pine pitch, crumbling into hot dusty heaps. The pianist is asked to play both on the keys and inside the piano in this movement, animating the entire piano like a sonic mobile. The central "Elegy" reaches back to the comforts of traditional piano sound, arriving like the work of memory. In doing so, the movement offers something like the sound of absence, its arabesques tracing absent shapes, its many pauses like questions posed to the empty air. The final panel of the triptych is punningly entitled "Meter-morphosis", linking Ovidian myths of transformation with the musical measure of the bar line. The longest movement of the three, it presents a process of mechanical assemblage, picking up one new element at a time, galvanizing the fragments of the Phoenix into idiosyncratic life. - from notes by Scott Burnham "[The relationship between my music and painting] is more complex than just expressing an affinity for the fine arts, I am discovering. It is, I believe, about the search for a form - not necessarily a new form in music, but one that allows me to adopt, almost as a subject, different perspectives on musical style itself." – Igor Korneitchouk.