all in due time

Date of Composition: 1973

Duration: 11'

Category: Solo

Instrumentation: Piano

all in due time was written in Rome and I gave the first performance at the American Academy in May, 1973. Afterwards, Giacinto Scelsi, the enigmatic and unique Italian composer whom I had never met, came up to and me said, “First part, good, last part, good, middle part, not good”. I mention this because, for better or worse, the middle part is instrumentally and technically distinctly different from the other two and he thought this a flaw. I think his observation applies to many of my pieces, that often within their individual boundaries, there is a pushing against a unified, a consistent approach. To some extentI would attribute this to my life-long interest in the music of Ives. The self-similarity of the first and third sections of all in due time, based on canonic writing in which the “correct” solution, in this
case, two scale patterns, is preceded by many “wrong” ones is, from the point of view of consistency, spoiled by the middle part which is freely composed.

all in due time has been recorded by Jenny Q Chai on a Naxos CD 9’70216.