Piano Diary / Michael Longton (1995)
 

    "Piano Diary began as an exercise in self discipline: in an effort to overcome my native shiftlessness I undertook to commit one fragment—no matter how brief—to paper each day. As this collection grew, I decided to impose on it a simple but rigid structure. Each idea would be required to recur, first two days later, then three days after that, then four, then five, etc. In this way, ideas accumulate, collide, and interact with each other, yet at the same time everything eventually fades, is forgotten. The result is, that while there is a great deal of repetition in the piece, it is more about forgetting than remembering. But it’s also the work of an ex-pianist, full of nostalgia for the great days of the piano and always on the lookout for something that can be rescued."
    - Michael Longton
 

    Canadian composer Michael Longton lives in British Columbia, where he is Director of the School of Music at the University of Victoria. For many years he wrote mainly electroacoustic music, but since the mid-1980s he has concentrated on music for chamber ensembles and for solo piano. His works show two seemingly contradictory tendencies: on the one hand the use of automatic processes, often involving Markov chains and finite state automata, along with a very non-linear and freely associative approach to large-scale structure.