Glenn Stallcop Composer, Performer
Three Nocturnes (2006)
For solo piano
3 Mvts., 12 Mins.
Three Nocturnes is available here from American Composers Alliance.
Program Notes with Score Video
In 2006, I had reached a mild compositional crisis and found myself having trouble writing music. I suppose you could call it a writer’s block, but it was more procedural than inspirational. I had committed myself to free improvisation and had previously been using some of the improvisations as a basis for writing my compositions, but my procedures were no longer working the way they had. I found myself doing not much more than arranging the improvisations, and I felt a twinge of nostalgia for the time when I was composing music from scratch.
As a result, I wrote these nocturnes for piano based on some procedures I had used some twenty years earlier. They are freely composed, though they end up where they started. They are not an arch, but more of a circle. The musical style is rather nostalgic as well.
I performed these pieces at various times at the church I was attending at the time (Valley Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Chandler, AZ), but I didn’t do much else with them. They can be performed as a set, the second being the most active of the three, but they also work well being performed separately.
Score Video