Encaged (2018)

For solo piano (and dancer)
Choreography by Erin Dillon
Duration: 7 minutes
Written for Periapsis Music and Dance

World premiere: November 8, 2018
Dixon Place, NYC
Jonathan Howard Katz, piano
Dancer: Erin Dillon

This work is available for retail purchase from Theodore Front Musical Literature.
This work is available for institutional purchase from Harrassowitz (OttoEditions) and Theodore Front Musical Literature.
To purchase a PDF of this score to perform from a tablet, please click here.

Program note: I wrote Encaged for choreographer Erin Dillon, with the idea that it would be a work for one dancer and piano that we could perform together. By this point we’d collaborated on several pieces, so it was easy to get into a groove—I’d write and record some music, send it to her, and she’d take it into the studio and work a bit on her own. Then I’d join her, and we’d start to put it together and discuss what would come next, and any changes we wanted to make. The piece itself relates to the feeling of being pulled in multiple directions at the same time, something Erin embodied brilliantly in the challenging and intricate movement. The music expresses this with subtle chromatic shifts that often give the sense of being in two keys at once, or heading toward a goal that proves to be a moving target.