Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 03/18/1997, uploaded on 07/21/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Derus Simples is a continuous work whose gestures, shape and character result from expansions of simple sounds or ideas - "simples" - into complexities that frequently revert back to their simple origins.

The prevailing simple in this work is the tritone (usually F-B, near the center of the keyboard).  Derus Simples begins and end with this tritone.  However developed, its presence throughout the piece ought generally to be clear.

The first part of Derus Simples expands on the tritone in an easily heard manner: the simple dyad accumulates notes in a variety of attack and decay modes while registrally expanding to the keyboard's lowest and highest B's.  The following part develops arpeggiated and single-string aggregates, with the arpeggiations expanding into fluid passages and the aggregates articulating their own "chorale" (however interrupted by the fluid passages), both of which, in turn, eventually prepare for the work's central, contrapuntal section.

The contrapuntal section starts five times, with each start (except the second) leading to a progressively more elaborate and obviously more demanding development.  The final development of this section at first dissipates to a momentary, quite contemplation of material surrounding the central F-B tritone, and later to a progressively more frenzied approach to three "curtains" of sounds that prepare for the final section of Derus Simples.  Each curtain consists of the same vast arpeggiation, low to high, followed by a version of the previously heard material.

The final section presents much of the work's original material but in reverse order, with interpolations from the contrapuntal section and sudden "mini" elaborations here and there.  The opening arpeggiations are recalled, as is the central contrapuntal section, while the original tritone becomes progressively more isolated as the end approaches, until it stands alone.

George Flynn