EMPS

Composer’s Notes:
The Big Sandy Suite was commissioned in 2007 to celebrate the release of a young man who had been incarcerated for seven years in a federal prison.    While in prison, this young man focused his time on drawing and visual arts.    Seven pieces of his prison art were used to form an ‘aural image’ of what the art work would sound like when set to music—the Big Sandy is the result.    Although originally written for jazz ensemble, three of the movements have been transcribed for piano duets—EMPS, Bewilderness, and Joy Explosion!
The title of this movement, EMPS, is an acronym for Easy Money Poets Society.  The East Money Poets Society was the group of friends that commissioned this piece to celebrate the artist’s release from prison.   It is also a play on the word imp—a small, mischievous devil or sprite.   The artist scattered tiny imps throughout much of the artwork that was the inspiration for this suite.    I use small, one or two measure melodies, scattered throughout as musical imps.   The opening bars begin almost sensuously lazy but then the mood shifts and it is high energy and driving rhythms until the final bars where one of the musical imps has the final ‘word.’

Performance Notes:
    This piece is written for a duet—one piano, four hands.    It can, of course, be played on two pianos with the four hands but the music is written with both primo and secondo ‘stacked’ on the same system.  When notated this way, both the primo and secondo pianists are fully aware of the music and can readily see the notation and keyboard position of the duet partner.   Another positive factor for this type of piano duet notation is availability of pianos in performance venues—it is quite common to have only one piano at the venue.