2023

Finding Beauty in Small Places

for piano

Buy the Score (Print)

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

Selected Press

for the Guitar Version of this Work

"The title of Chester Biscardi's Finding Beauty in Small Places was, serendipitously, enunciated by a friend of the composer's describing the work's evolution. It aptly describes the way that the guitar can create beauty in a single chord or a brief melody. As the work progresses, the ideas lengthen somewhat, always arriving at a moment of beauty."

Soundboard: the Journal of the Guitar Foundation of America

Al Kinsey, October 2026

"Chester Biscardi’s 'Finding Beauty in Small Places' (2021) follows the advice of its title by using the composer’s breath to shape its musical gestures."

San Francisco Classical Voice

Scott Cmiel, February 2026

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.