Alex Shapiro, composer: For My Father

For My Father

from,
Piano Suite No. 1: The Resonance of Childhood

Decline, and acceptance.

(Solo Piano).
Total duration ca. 5 minutes (1996)
Published by Activist Music (ASCAP).
Part of a Five movement work: "Variations on a Memory," "On My Mother," "Quiet Child," "For My Father," and "Older."
19 pages, 8.5" x 11".

Premiered in November 1996 in Los Angeles, CA.
by Zita Carno, piano.

Audio clips performed by Adam Marks, piano.

Also related:

Piano Suite No. 1: The Resonance of Childhood

View the first page and hear a music sample of any of the five movements:
	View	Hear
1. Variations on a Memory
2. On My Mother
3. Quiet Child
4. For My Father
5. Older
Watch!
____________________
Purchase the score to For My Father Score available for $18.00 print, $8.00 digital, from Activist Music.
Purchase the score for the entire Suite Score available for $30.00 print, $12.00 digital, from Activist Music.

Piano Suite No. 1: The Resonance of Childhood was composed as a set of personal reflections exploring early years, difficult parental relationships and ultimately the acceptance of conflicting emotions. Intentionally simple, this piece is a personal reflection of a childhood that remains unsettling. The opening set of variations sets the tone for the entire Suite: searching and hope that are met with the uncomfortable combination of disappointment and acquiescence.

Of the five short movements, perhaps the most intimate is the fourth, entitled For My Father, which was written in response to a beloved parent's descent into dementia. As some notes fall downward and others struggle against that decline, the music reflects the composer's experience of watching a brilliant parent’s irreversible descent. Echoing the personal journey of witnessing her father’s essence evaporate over seven years, this elegiac piece ends with the quiet, resolute acceptance of loss.

For My Father is featured on Susanne Kessel's 2006 CD, Californian Concert, on Oehms Classics OC 534. Click CD for more info.

For My Father is featured on the 2007 Innova Recordings CD, Notes from the Kelp (innova 683). Click CD for more info.

Alex Shapiro has produced a significant album of her solo piano works, including the entire PIANO SUITE NO.1, beautifully performed by New York pianist Adam Marks. The 2020 disc, ARCANA, has been released on Innova Recordings 041.

Email Alex for the access code
to download a perusal score!

Here is a video of pianist Susanne Kessel
performing For My Father,
live at Villa Aurora, in Los Angeles:

"The most serious work on the album, the solo-piano For My Father, depicts the descent into dementia of the composer's father; here again Shapiro is both emotionally immediate and capable of sustaining a structural process over a long stretch."

— James Manheim, All Music Guide

"...particularly compelling"

— David Toub, Sequenza21

"For my Father, a document of a gradual descent into dementia, is a dark episode, an eerie and questioning motive spiralling helplessly down into bitter acceptance."

— Tobias Fischer, Tokafi

"For My Father” is the fourth movement of Ms. Shapiro’s 1996 five-movement Piano Suite No. 1: The Resonance of Childhood, and the sixth track on this twelve-track CD. It’s an elegy on the inexorable descent of Ms. Shapiro’s father into dementia — an anguished, extended questioning of fate ending in quiet resignation the totality of the movement seeming to echo the sense of the words if not the original meaning of Beethoven’s famous written question and answer on the beginning and ending pages, respectively, of the last movement of his last quartet: “Muss es sein? Es muss sein. [Must it be? It must be.]”

— A.C. Douglas, Sounds & Fury

"For My Father” remains with the listener as it convincingly conveys the painful journey of loss."

— Sherry Kloss, Mu Phi Epsilon's "The Triangle"

1. Variations on a Memory

2. On My Mother

3. Quiet Child

4. For My Father

5. Older