Toward the Surface - Sonata for solo piano. Premiered in November 2024 by Wenbo Xing. Commercial recording by Kyle Adam Blair releasing in 2026 on New World Records.

I. Breaks Loose II. In the Throes III. Respite IV. Lurches and Lapses

Toward the Surface was originally finished in November 2023. The piece was originally written as a short cycle containing three miniatures for solo piano, with the cycle meant to be a kind of warm-up for my time as a master’s student at the Eastman School of Music. In these three pieces, I embraced a more flexible developmental style than what I had been used to up to that point. Over the course of the ensuing months, however, I began to feel increasingly dissatisfied with the work that I had done on the piece. I became especially hostile to the third miniature, which I thought to be an incongruous mess of a piece. So, when I returned to Rochester in August 2024 after my summer break, I decided to go back and try to fix my issues with the piece. The work proved to be a much more involved task than I had expected. I ended up completely deleting the third miniature, and I wrote essentially from scratch the 3rd and 4th movements of what I soon realized was my first piano sonata. While the work was difficult, I am pleased to say that writing the latter half of this piece was some of the most fun composition work I had done in quite a long time.

The relation between the movements of Toward the Surface and traditional sonata form is tenuous at best. The first movement is hardly in sonata-allegro form, and the third movement bears little resemblance to that of the song-forms in a Beethoven or Mozart sonata. The piece thus exists more in line with the idea of the Baroque sonata, a collection of movements which share similar characters and key centers, but which otherwise bear little resemblance to each other.