DISSOLVE (2025)
Instrumentation: solo piano
Duration: ~11 minutes
Performance/Recording History:
Premiered by Maxim Lando on December 17, 2025 at his Graduation Recital in Morse Hall at The Juilliard School in New York City, NY.
Performed by Yang (Jack) Gao on April 1, 2026 at the composer’s Graduation Recital in Morse Hall at The Juilliard School in New York City, NY.
Recorded by Yang (Jack) Gao on April 16, 2026 in Morse Hall at The Juilliard School in New York City, NY.
Performed by Yang (Jack) Gao on May 1, 2026 at the Juilliard Composition Concert in Morse Hall at The Juilliard School in New York City, NY.
Performed by Yang (Jack) Gao on May 9, 2026 at The 2026 NowBeat Concert at the Tenri Cultural Institute in New York City, NY.
Program Notes:
To me, listening to music is a lot like looking at a Pointillist painting. Just as these works are composed of countless tiny blots of paint, music is made up of many small-scale ideas, statements, and moments. When perceived at a distance, these miniscule components cumulate into large-scale gestures, images, and journeys that we feel viscerally.
In writing Dissolve, I sought to take advantage of this phenomenon and create one overarching gesture that spans the piece’s entire duration. This gesture is a decrescendo, or a gradual decrease in volume, intensity, and/or density.
My global decrescendo is constructed primarily from a 4-note motif which is introduced in the piano’s opening flourish. The music at the beginning is rambunctious and capricious, but slowly and gradually, the piece dissolves and melts until we finally reach a place of quiet simplicity. The motif traces this voyage, and only at the very end do we hear it stated in its true, unadorned form.