Stasis

Stasis is a short chaconne for viola and piano premiered by violist Alexia DelGuidice Bigari with the composer on piano at The Juilliard School’s Paul Hall. A “chaconne” is a dance popularized in the Baroque era. Among others, its primary distinguishing characteristic is that it follows a repeating sequence of bass notes. This often gets confused with it following a repeating sequence of chords, rather like today’s four-chord pop songs. But “chords” by our modern understanding were not what was under consideration and development in the heyday of the chaconne. Nonetheless, modern ears are trained by pop music to inseparably associate bass notes with their most- expected root-position chord. This tension is what “Stasis” seeks to explore. As a Baroque keyboardist and a pop and jazz pianist, I’ve come to understand the fundamental practice of “Here’s a bass line, maybe some chords, and a vibe—Go!” as near-universal to Western musics. Rather than wrestling with the stylistic requirements of each genre, I sought to write something that took these contrasts and equalized them, creating something quite new but somehow familiar. “Stasis” represents what has remained consistent for centuries in this idea of repeated-chords-music and where one can take it next.