The "2.5-Part Invention" was conceived and started on an airplane flight to Israel in May 1995, and after intermittent progress finally reached its present form in February 1996. To listen to (or read at the keyboard) and enjoy the Invention, it should not be necessary to read these paragraphs; if the piece works, it does so on its own. However, the following text concerning the genesis, construction and larger context of the piece may answer some questions that may come to the listener's mind and make certain features of the composition more accessible.
As one may guess from the title1 and confirm from the score and performance, the piece is strongly inspired by the keyboard music of J. S. Bach. More specifically, it achieves a task suggested by the C#-major prelude of The Well-Tempered Clavier I. In that prelude, as in my Invention, the first four phrases rise four steps in the "Circle of Fifths" as the left and right hands trade musical themes. In Bach's prelude, the next phrase quickly goes back down the Circle to the home key and a further, fifth step to the subdominant, whence the rest of the piece reestablishes the tonic. I wondered whether I could, in a Baroque context, make my way all the way around the Circle of Fifths and back. Thus the fifth phrase of my invention goes four more steps up the Circle. At that point (measures 25-6) I "cheat", introducing a pedal D so that the last four steps back to C will not interfere with the coming modulation to the dominant G. That G is finally attained at 36, with the C reached at 30 serving as a springboard via an inverted pedal progression I first noticed in Mozart's C-minor mass. The second "half" of the Invention (starting at41) reverses the procedure, going down the entire circle from G to G and -- as in Bach's prelude -- further to C and F, while repeating and extending the pedal-point subterfuge; finally equilibrium is reached at the tonic C (86-90), but not before almost the entire Circle of Fifths has been further compressed into two bars (81-2).
While the 2.5-Part Invention may sound like Bach, it could not have been written by the Bach we know, because it diverges from his practice not only in the treatment of the Circle of Fifths but also rhythmically: Bach and his contemporaries always wrote in duple or triple meter, while my Invention is in a syncopated 5/8 time, with five-measure phrases to boot. Still, though written in the twilight of the twentieth century, the 2.5-Part Invention is much closer in sound and spirit to Bach than to "modern music" of either the "serious" or "popular" persuasion. In writing such music now, I do intend (beyond addressing musical concerns such as explained earlier) to make a kind of artistic statement, but not one of outright repudiation of "modern music"—if only because there are certain modern pieces of concert or popular music that I unreservedly admire and even envy. But, at least as much as Bartok and Gershwin, I also admire and envy the musical masterpieces of earlier generations; while not repudiating modern music, I want to reclaim and celebrate the best of earlier music, and reject familiar proclamations that these older materials are exhausted or otherwise off-limits to composers of our century, and soon of the twenty-first.
Indeed, for a musician, one of the best things about living today rather than any earlier age is that, for the first time, we have at our disposal almost the whole history of Western composition, over 600 years of different ways of writing and making music; and I think it's a damn shame for composers to deny ourselves some of the best of these because they happen not to be the newest. I have found it wonderfully liberating to realize that I am not limited as a composer to a handful of idioms that are deemed "musically correct" for my generation; that I can—as did Bach and Mozart and Brahms—also draw on the music of the great masters of the past for composing new and vital music. When the idea for what became the "2.5-Part Invention" occurred to me, Baroque counterpoint was the natural framework, so that's how I wrote it. Enjoy!