(Audio is a midi realization)
Waiting
Video is of pianist Hayk Arsenyan’s beautiful premiere performance of Waiting at the Brand Library & Art Center, Glendale, CA.
Tangents – for piano
Released 2008: Moods – Piano Music by American Women Composers, Max Lifchitz, piano, North/South Recordings (Audio is an excerpt)
Tangents derives its name from divergent musical lines that seem to arrive and depart from a musical center, much like fragments of thoughts that tangentially pass through conversations. – RW
Summer Nights
Released 2010: If Only Knowing, CDBaby
Among my first compositions… before I knew how to notate music. Audio is from an early concert of piano pieces that I played from memory and recorded at Charlemagne Palestine’s Tribeca loft, NYC.
Sad Laughter (for my father)
Released 2010: If Only Knowing, CDBaby
This was among my first compositions… before I knew how to notate music, and so was performed from memory and recorded in an early concert. It was dedicated to my father, Phillip Jones, an extraordinary man, who at the time, early in his life, was valiantly facing terminal cancer. – RW
Longing
Released 2007: If Only Knowing, CDBaby
Among my first compositions… before I knew how to notate music. Performed from memory and recorded in an early concert.
If Only Knowing
Released 2010: If Only Knowing, CDBaby
Among my first compositions… before I knew how to notate music, and so was performed from memory and recorded in an early concert.
Hourglass
Released 2008: Moods: Piano Music by American Women Composers, Max Lifchitz, piano, North/South Recordings
Video features pianist Nataliya Medvedovskaya stunning performance at Bargemusic.
Hourglass is a musical reflection on the passage of time and the delicacy and variable nature of its passing – as in the shifting phases of sand in a turning hourglass. – RW
Dark Dreams – for piano
Released 2008: Moods: Piano Music by American Women Composers, Max Lifchitz, piano, North/South Recordings
Audio features a concert recording by pianist, Desiree Bonitz at the 2016 Missouri State University Composition Festival
Dark Dreams was inspired by a painting by Jared FitzGerald. The germinating idea for the piece relates to the image of an angel in the moonlight wrestling with a shadowy figure. Dark Dreams extends the metaphor to the struggles with emotional demons confronted in life. – RW
Painting by Jared FitzGerald
Conversation Before the Rain
Released 2010: If Only Knowing, CDBaby
This was one of my first compositions… before I knew how to notate music, and so was performed from memory and recorded in an early concert at Charlemagne Palestine’s loft.
The music takes me emotionally to the feeling of an intimate moment shared within sheltered space, looking out – perhaps to the turbulent sky before an approaching storm. – RW
Always Almost
Released 2008: Moods: Piano Music by American Women Composers, North/South Recordings
An expression of the profound realization that some of life’s deepest yearnings may remain unfulfilled, seemingly just out of reach – just ‘always almost.’ Yet from this sadness music arose. – RW