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 17
Solo Piano Improvisations
by
Ron Thomas
Released
in 2006 - Vectordisc 004
Ron's 17 Solo Piano
Improvisations, is available from Tarnius Music and CDBaby.com and Amazon.com.
Individual tracks and the album are also available from iTunes. Search for "Ron Thomas Improvisations."
Unreleased
and out-of-print recordings available by contacting
17 SOLO PIANO IMPROVISATIONS is a suite of loosely related, variously
styled improvised pieces orbiting around certain features of the
music of Franz Liszt. They document the idea of a direct pathway
from the Beethoven-influenced-Liszt on to Debussy, Bartok, Schoenberg,
Ligeti, Stockhausen, and certain features of mid-20th century jazz.
My abiding affection for Liszt's personality and work began
with my early reading of his fantastic life story with which I
was as intoxicated as I was with his music (especially those remarkable
Ruth Slencszynska Decca recordings from the 1950s, all of which
should be reissued)! His legendary life led me to an idealized-heroic
lifestyle of my own wherein I too would dedicate myself to the
pursuit of the true, the noble, the new, and the beautiful in music.
 RON COMMENTS: 'Liszt is likely to have agreed
in principle to the following which I include here as yet one more
variation on the theme of a manifesto on my artistic method. Lasting
Art is best forged in the fires of the artist's
personality alone. (By "personality" I do not mean
style or idiom. Observable characteristics of style and idiom have
nothing useful to contribute to the process of making art that
will last). This is done by honoring intrinsic [and no other] protocols
in the process of making the work. Observe those limitations and
conditions to which you (the artist) by circumstance are unavoidably
subject, and then also those limitations and conditions to which
the individual work at hand itself is by necessity subject. If
art is to be served by your work, maintain a vigilant indifference
to arbitrary constraints of time and place (history). If everything
else necessary is present then your work of art will surely be
a living and lasting one.'
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL EXCERPT: 1957: It is a
warm afternoon in Montclair, New Jersey. I am lying in our hammock
reading a biography of Liszt, and looking above me into the flickering
light of the warm summer sun pouring between the leaves of the
tree, "What a grand
thing to give one's
life to Music and struggle bravely to join the ranks of the Immortals!!"
--from Fragments by Ron Thomas
Recorded and mixed by John Vanore at Widener University, 1991.
Piano technician, Steve Sikora.
Mastered by Paul G. Kohler, 2006.
www.artofliferecords.com
Produced by Richard Burton
CD Art Design by Danny Schweers, www.w2mw.org
Vectordisc 004, copyright 2006
Ron Thomas Music (ascap)
Click
here to see other recordings by Ron Thomas.
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