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2023

Finding Beauty in Small Places

for piano

Buy the Score (Print)
Buy the Score (Digital)
Program Notes

Video

Read the No Dead Guys article about this performance:

Article

Premiere

Rhonda Rizzo, piano

New Normal Studio, video
March 22, 2024

Work Details

Duration:

ca. 7 minutes

Publisher:

Biscardi Music Press
No.B48-23-1

Distributer:

Theodore Front Musical Literature, Inc.

Dedication:

Piano Version for Rhonda Rizzo

Other Version:

Solo Guitar

Sample Pages
Dialog window
Cover of a Naxos CD titled "A-Z of String Players by David Milsom"

Program Notes

This solo piano version of Finding Beauty in Small Places (2023) is dedicated to my friend, the pianist and writer Rhonda Rizzo. It was originally commissioned in 2021 as a work for solo guitar for the guitarist David Leisner by The Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music. I owe the title to my dear friend Russell Merritt who listened to me describe how the work was evolving. How I’d been tied to the idea of “breath”—of breathing in and breathing out—as a way of shaping the musical gestures. And how, when the piece opens up and tries to move forward, trying to break free, it always returns inward. He said: “It seems like you’re trying to find beauty in small places.” His words made me think that this work, in fact, is a timely affirmation of beauty and purpose in a changed and challenging world.

This work is dependent on memory and the movement of breath, on breathing the musical gestures and following the lead of the rhythms and the poetry inherent in the breath—a pattern of breathing in and breathing out established in the first seven measures.