The Fantasy Pieces (1959-60) were written at age twenty-two, while I was a graduate student at Princeton University. They began in response to composer-professor Earl Kim's suggestion that I try writing some twelve-tone music. Each of the pieces does, in fact start with a tone row. However, my ear—quite differently inclined—led me down another, more tonal, path that finally ended far from dodecaphony, on an unresolved dominant seventh chord.
The four pieces are highly virtuosic and were written at a time when my piano-playing career was in full flower. The first two are delicate and kaleidoscopic, the third (...Diabolique) is demonic, and the last (and longest) is, by contrast almost Wagnerian in its tonal outpourings.
The pianist Alan Marks describes Fantasy Pieces as follows: "... a set of four brief impressions that are in every sense fantastic: intensely focused emotional expressions of wildness, dreaminess, nervousness or spaciousness. What is important in each piece is the gesture— the specific notes seeming to exist secondarily to the impulse of the moment. These impulses rarely occur in strict rhythm; a hesitation will precipitate a sudden rush which may be sustained or bum out in an instant. This ebb and flow of the rhythm gives the music its improvisatory flavor. As brief as each movement is—as in Webern's music—it is highly expressionistic and structurally bound by only two or three ideas.
The pieces are dedicated to four composer/performer friends (in order): Stephanie Shehatovitch, Earl Kim, Jules Langert, and Robert Helps.
– DAVID DEL TREDICI, 2001
