GHOST PIANO SONGS

GHOST PIANO SONGS was composed in 1995 by Joseph Weber, in collaboration with poet Jennifer Dove Maurer. Mauer’s poems were inspired by Weber’s stories of an old broken-down player piano he had come across in a remote locale. Weber was haunted by this piano, almost as if it were a ghost of long past musical offerings. Maurer took an extremely free and abstract approach to the poems. Encouraged by Weber, she worked in a stream of consciousness mode to develop lyrics that consistently defy explanation, as they unleash an inner monologue of unrequited love, sadness, loneliness, loss, and most of all, a strange, often disturbing disconnectedness from reality. Weber’s settings are similarly ‘disconnected,’ flowing freely and constantly among distorted jazz chords, Wagnerian harmonic wanderings, and poignantly searching melodic lines…with haunting results.   

I.   Yellow Umbrellas
II.  Black Mask
III. Virgin’s Red Lips
IV. The Caretaker

DURATION: about 13 minutes