Heatstroke On A Sand Dune Three Miles North Of Yazd, Iran (1996) by Gord Sellar

A piano major who shall remain nameless (I've forgotten his name, and imagine I'm not alone) promised to perform this for my third year composition recital, and then didn’t show up for the recital. To my chagrin, I found a note taped to my locker with an apology, roughly an hour before the recital began.

In any case, my professor, Gyula Csapó, was familiar with the piece, so he practiced it a bit backstage, and then performed a pretty solid "rendition" of it. He refused to call it a "performance," just a "rendition" or "impression" of the piece, understandably, since he was all but sight-reading it. A week or two later, he actually "performed" it, and that’s what this recording is.

This is my experiment with trying to use a "drone" (as a repeating percussive note, not as a held constant tone)for the piano. It is absolutely not idiomatic to the piano: I'm not a pianist, and the composition professor I worked with next shook his head when listening to the recording, saying, "Well, it's not really piano music, you know?" He had me focus on writing for winds and strings, which was probably a good move. But I still get a kick out of the piece.