forgive me, fryderyk

for piano solo (1984), 5’

"Forgive Me, Fryderyk" was born one day in 1984 when, on a whim, I made a photocopy of the printed score of Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude and cut it up so that each measure was on a separate fragment of paper.  I put the fragments into an envelope, shook them up, and then threw them up in the air and they landed scattered all over the floor.  I then picked each scrap of paper up one by one, taping each one successively onto a blank sheet of paper to resemble a musical score.  I made sure to turn the blank sides around so that there was always some music notated on each scrap. But since the detached measures were not accompanied by clefs, they were often taped onto the paper upside down from their original orientation in the original score.  While each measure was something Chopin had composed 150 years earlier, the order of the measures was completely random and completely new.