Winner of 3 Global Music Awards. President of MSR Classics writes, "I absolutely love this music. I am not sure what I am hearing, such is the fascinating harmonies and turns of melody. Is it impressionistic? Is it jazz? Is it ‘new age’. It is everything. Really, this is just gorgeous, thoughtful music.” - Robert LaPorta, President of MSR Classics.

Meet the pianist:

Katherine Benson is a young American pianist and student of world-renowned piano professor Nelita True at the Eastman School of Music. Katherine has performed numerous times across the United States, including a solo performance at the Eastman School of Music’s premiere concert venue, Kodak Hall, opening the concert of contemporary music ensemble Musica Nova under the baton of critically-acclaimed conductor Brad Lubman. Katherine has also won numerous awards, which include 1st place in the Tennessee Division of the Music Teachers National Association and Runner-up at the Southeastern Division; 1st place winner for three consecutive years at the Tennessee Music Teachers Association State Competition; 1st place winner at the Bristol Music Club Scholarship Audition (’08, ’11); 1st place winner at the Knoxville Choral Society (’09) alongside a performance at the Society’s Honors Concert; and Honorable Mention, Lee University Piano Competition (’09) where she received an ovation for the best single performance in the history of the competition.

About the work:

On November 7th, 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington famously fell due to a gale that was vibrating at the same frequency as the bridge's natural resonance. This coincidence of frequencies caused the bridge to sway at such speed and amplitude that the whole massive structure crashed to the ground.

The aggravation of resonance can have powerful effects on nature, and seeking how to harness and exploit it became the impetus to write this set of twenty-four preludes. I applied specific principles in regards to rhythm, contour, and harmony to try and exarcerbate particular natural phenomena that relate to resonance.

Imagine sitting on a swing and having someone gently push you. With time, you will rise higher and higher. This is one of the more common metaphors for describing resonance and this notion is re-created compositionally through the concept of rhythmic integrity. Each movement uses two to three sets of short, single beat, rhythmic cells. The different cells are intertwined in such a way as to create variety, but the pulse is always strong such that resonance is always increasing in the same fashion as if you were being pushed on a swing and gradually rising higher.

When two waves vibrate at the same or near the same frequency, they will combine to produce a wave whose amplitude is greater than that possessed by either wave originally. This natural phenomenon is known as constructive interference, and was exploited through musical means by maximizing the amount of intervallic consonance in the harmonic material. Consonant intervals produce a greater amount of constructive resonance due to the principal of Coincidence of Partials, a concept related to the relationship of the harmonic series between the pitches, and is explained in detail in Roederer's ground-breaking work "The Physics and Psychophysics of Music: An Introduction."

In order to maximize the sense of motion, the concept of inertia was applied in the treatment of the contours of the individual musical lines. Lines moving in a direction will continue to do so only to change direction when a significant event in the musical material causes them to do otherwise. Perpetual harmonic destabilization and retonicization is applied with the principle in mind that the ability of any particular harmony to reverberate to its highest potential in the listeners mind becomed dulled with time. Each prelude is kept short in order to last the full length of a listener's attention span.

These last three principles relate to psychoacoustics, and are combined with the previous two principles of physical resonance to create a work that intertwines Man, the principles that relate to psychoacoustics, with Nature, the principles that relate to physical resonance.

This work, hence, defies the growing public notion that mathematically-conceived scientifically-driven music cannot be beautiful in a non-esoteric fashion. I searched for the beauty and harmony in nature, and laid my findings in this set of twenty-four preludes.