PROGRAM NOTE:
Bagatelles is a set of eighth extremely brief movements for the somewhat unusual ensemble of English horn, bassoon, and piano. It is one of a number of works that Iʼve composed while “between pieces,” and in which I experiment with different kinds of forms, or processes, or melodic or harmonic or rhythmic ideas. Bagatelles is most obviously concerned with playing out simple concepts, like the accelerating rhythms of the second bagatelle, or presenting the whole-scale inversion of a movement, as in the pair of canons that make up the fourth and sixth bagatelles. The eighth bagatelle exists as more of a sketch in my Six Pieces for solo piano of the same year, and achieves its full flowering in Anapestes a couple of years after the Bagatelles.