As darkly unsettling as Introspections numbers 1 and 2 may be, number 3 is quirky and perhaps equally disturbing in a very different way. This very short 55 second movement was also born at an early morning hour after I had awakened from a dream state. The predominant feeling I was having was one of disorientation and disconnection, of intermittent and disrupted thought, difficult to pin down. What I composed was this brief, spritely idea that never fully develops or shows itself. I wanted to suggest a façade, something that is at its core not what it presents itself to be. And just as it begins to take shape, it ends.

The piece opens with a very simple rapid four note motive that is followed by silence. This pattern of motive-silence-motive-silence repeats throughout, but the duration of the silences differs each time they occur. Initially, I composed each silence as a specific beat-duration of one or more bars of rest. What became clear when Heinrich started to play the movement for me was the agony he was going through trying to be absolutely accurate with each of the resting silences, to a level that was driving him to distraction.

This turned into one of those teachable moments where a performer shows a composer how not to do something. I had never intended that the rests should be so meticulously counted to a level of mechanical accuracy. Instead, I was hearing in my head a “lift”, a silence of approximate duration, where the silences would be longer or shorter as a way of playing with the listener’s expectation. Because Heinrich was working so hard to make these silences metronomically accurate, it was clearly throwing him off when came time to play the notes! After going back and forth with Heinrich to try and clarify my intentions, it became evident that I needed to renotate the silences to be less anxiety making. In the final version, the silent bars became rests with fermatas, with a suggested approximate duration marked in seconds rather than absolute beats. It was a simple change for me to make, but it is a perfect illustration of how my desire to clearly express my intention was thwarted by a notation that was unkind to the performer.

This is one of the great joys of working with Heinrich as a collaborator: he teaches me new things every time I sit with him--a testament to his generosity, patience, and musicianship.