PROGRAM NOTE
My Ten Children’s Scenes belong to an early body of compositions I created in my teens. I composed this set of pieces for young players as well as young listeners (and all other “young at hearts”), recalling the formative time in my life when I was learning Bartok’s Mikrokosmos, assigned to me by my piano teacher Miriam Boskovich whose husband, noted Israeli composer Alexander Uriah Boskovich, was my first composition teacher. Learning the Mikrokosmos was for me an early encounter with music that was not only tonally non-traditional but that also opened a door to other elements of music that signaled a departure from music I had studied up until then.
A secondary goal for me was to create music that would encourage “collaborative playing” suitable for a duet of students, or perhaps a student-teacher pairing. The latter would potentially support a young student by providing the steadying foundation to scenes with mixed meters and asymmetric phrase structures.
Regardless of age, it was my hope that the whimsical titles I gave many of the scenes would encourage the players’ imagination and sense of fantasy.
- A Little Invention
- Tribal Dance
- Rag Doll Valse
- A Game
- A Dark Night
- A Little Toccata
- A Tale
- Giant Step
- The Ghostly Pond
- The Tin Soldier
In addition to the publication of the full set by Carl Fischer, Rag Doll Valse and A Game were later incorporated into Carl Fischer’s piano four-hand multi-composer Music Pathways series, catalog number O4975.
—Shulamit Ran
RECORDINGS
The Piano Duo of Iris Graffman Wenglin & Ruth Lomon, on Homage to Women Composers, Navona NV 6254