New solo piano

“October Opus 1” evokes the final days of autumn, when the warmth of the season has begun to disappear and winter can already be felt in the distance. The music moves between restless motion and quiet reflection, like a solitary journey through an October landscape at dusk.

There is a feeling of memory running beneath the piece, a sense that something has already happened and cannot be recovered. The changing intensity suggests maple leaves carried by the wind, distant storms, fading sunlight, and the gradual arrival of darkness which calms me, as well as the cold shift.

Rather than portraying autumn as peaceful or nostalgic, the piece presents it as a season of transition: beautiful, mysterious, and slightly unsettling. As the music progresses, the outside world seems to fall away until my memory is only what remains

It is ultimately a piece about change, remembrance, and trying again to letting go but another year failed.

Below is the companion poem

October Opus 1

Warmth has started running through the cracks in the doors,
quiet and sneaking, the way it always does,
and winter stands at the edge of the fields I grew up around,
waiting to frost over nature’s beauty and kill it.

Leaves lift and blow in whirlwinds, restless, unsettling,
a hurried life chasing the wind.
Then a hush, a silent reckoning. A single held note
over the dusk sky, over the gravel roads that never end.

Somewhere a storm is rehearsing its magnum opus
as daylight thins to a silk thread.
I walk on, alone, through what is not peace from the weeks before,
but it’s also not quite sorrow either.

Something seems to linger, something that has already happened on this land.
The air keeps the smell of it every year,
a name in maple leaves,
a sense that closes before I turn.

Darkness creeps in under the trees.
The world falls away into hiding, branch by branch,
creek by creek,
until only the memory remains and another year is gone again.

And I let it go
the way the season always does,
beautiful, strange, a little afraid,
one last dying leaf released into the darkness again.