Duration: 8 minutes
Instrumentation: solo piano
Program note:
"Opening unapologetically on the very prohibited intervals for which it is named (parallel fifths, parallel octaves, and even parallel tritones),'Forbidden Parallels' merges West and East modeling after the distinctive intervals of the Balinese gamelan pentatonic scale—the source of the E-F-G-B-C pitch collection featured in its opening measures. Here, considerable compositional mileage is culled from the work’s brief obstinate theme. In places, its discrete methodological approach to pitch, register, and rhythm recalls the spirit and scope of Copland’s 1930 masterpiece, Piano Variations. But it is the internal correspondences within and across the work’s clear sectional subdivisions where Wickman’s architecture asserts itself and commands attention. As these interrelationships culminate, they anticipate various sets of motivic reinterpretation and return—combining all matter of similar and contrary motion between right and left hands before breaking lines across them evenly at the meno mosso tempo shift that signals the work’s conclusion. Rather than end decisively, the music simply evaporates into its upper register as if exhausted, repeating the same C pitch class that framed the opening motive’s persistent two-octave span."
--Ryan Patrick Jones
