Last minute tango (2001)

for piano solo (1’)

Back in the late 1990s, pianist Guy Livingston launched a concert project of performing 60-second-long pieces by 60 different composers of widely different stylistic inclinations. It was an exhilarating public event to witness, even for a lifelong New Yorker like me who knows how fast a minute can be. It also became the basis of Livingston’s fabulous CD recording, called Don’t Panic: 60 Seconds for Piano. So I was delighted that when he decided to do a second set of sixty, this time with films expressly created to accompany the music (the reverse of how this usually works), he asked me to contribute a piece for it. Last Minute Tango is exactly what it says it is, a tango that lasts just a minute. Aside from very diverging from a steady tango rhythm, it’s unrepentantly in G-minor until the very end which you should hear without me ruining the surprise.