One of my favorite pieces of recent music for piano is a short piece called Anxiety. It's written by my cousin, and you can hear a student perform it by downloading it (click the LISTEN link to the piece) from her site.

I liked it the first time I heard it. I have it in my iPod queue, and it often comes up to my ears. I've grown to like it more, even though it's a tricky piece to play, and I've not even mastered the first few phrases yet (what a hopeless pianist I am!)...

The rest of the suite has never grabbed me that much (though it obviously has merit), but what I like about the piece is pretty obvious: it's theme is a great little (if rather strange) melody.

Other piano music on my iPod's playlist? Well, music by Henry Cowell (Anger Dance, Banshee, Three Irish Legends, Aeolian Harp), George Antheil (Jazz Sonata), Leo Ornstein (Suicide in an Airplane), John Adams (Phrygian Gates), Claude Debussy (Preludes, Images), Frederic Rzewski (Down by the Riverside, Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues), and William Bolcom (Graceful Ghost Rag).

And that's just my green iPod mini; my silver one has a completely different collection.

But no matter how much I may like the obviously great works by the great composers of the last century, I still keep coming back to Anxiety. I'm not an anxious person . . . any longer. I'm no longer working for employers doing things I'd rather not be doing. So my anxiety level is very low. But this piece called Anxiety . . . it captures a stance in the world that I find . . . congenial. Its odd rhythm (5/4, syncopated), its perfect resolution of its first dissonance (non-diatonic!), its ABA form (making the asymmetric symmetrical by formal organization!), these work together to artfully strike an off-kilter kind of spiritual poise.

I've tried to capture this odd feeling in some of my own compositions, but have not succeed as well as has composer Andrea L. Reinkemeyer. (And early in her career, to boot.)

I would like to hear a professional performance of the work. As it is, I still struggle with trying to play it myself. Maybe if I learn it, I could sneak into a piano store and play it on the instrument it almost demands, a nine-foot Bösendorfer.

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