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Programme Note

Dedicated with admiration and gratitude to pianist Dharshini Tambiah, Ballade for solo piano was commissioned and premiered by Dharshini Tambiah at Weill Hall of Carnegie Hall on April 25, 2009.

This 9-minute composition has a variety of characters, color and motion including: spacious, graceful, majestic, spry, jazzy, resonant, elegant, playful, lively, punchy, bright, and lyrical.

Perfumes of Augusta's musical "grandparents" (those being: Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, Mahler, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Berg, Berio, Brahms, and Knussen) can be sensed, yet, at the same time, Ballade is clearly a personal piece with a unique language.

Ballade is in a "woven" form and thus the image "Weaving Skyward" became the subtitle for the entire composition. Everything is an outgrowth of something else. Transformation is key. The music is organic. Different musical materials are interlaced, interlinked, and intertwined, returning in an asymmetrical, yet discernable, pattern.

It is perhaps worth pointing out a three things about the highly nuanced notation to do with fermatas, grace notes, and pedaling.

Very often, there are fermatas in the middle of a phrase, or suddenly in the middle of a fast running passage. They are meant to "throw off" the pulse and add to the whimsical variability of the desired "un-square-ness" of the flow. The pianist is asked to vary the durations of each fermata such that they do not become predictable. In this way, each performance will be slightly different from one another. Their duration should depend on the resonance of the instrument in the performance space.

Grace notes are used often and always come before the beat forcing the pulse to get pushed off, little by little, which is desired in order to keep the arabesque, capricious, floating, fluctuating feeling to the succession.

The sustaining "damper" pedal is often called "the soul of the piano". The right pedal on the modern piano, it raises all the dampers off the strings so that they can continue to vibrate and ring after a note on the keyboard has been released. This pedal is used extensively in this composition, often to give the sonic impression that bells that are ringing, and echoing, by allowing notes to resonate, and certain harmonies to be connected together. The notated pedal part is as important as the keyboard part.

- Augusta Read Thomas