Composed on a 17×22″ sheet of paper, this piece is written to be performed by five pianists in a number of possible arrangements. Intended for five pianos, the piece was premiered on 23 February 2014 by Drew Corey, Luke Morin, myself, Fernando Orellana, and Kerri Shak on the five parts respectively, using four pianos, in the Roy O. Disney Music Hall at the California Institute of the Arts.
The piece assigns the five players to both sonic and narrative ‘roles’ to portray a theatrical musical illustration of a burning building and the dying tenants within it. One pianists acts as the fire itself, using extended technique to wax into an inferno of death and wane into nothingness as the fire fades away. In the original performance I can be seen physically ‘suffocating’ one of the players by dampening the strings of that player’s piano until that character succumbs, one such example of the theatrics of this piece.
The score is hand-written in black and red ink to separate the differences between the narrative text and the performance instructions. It is made up of both text-score elements and graphic notation blocks to act as guidelines to the performers, who will strive to achieve a narrative display for the audience in a mostly improvisatory setting given basic melodic and harmonic cues to be embellished at their liberty.
