I wrote The Great American Piano Trio in 1983 that was premiered at my senior recital at UNT (then NTSU) in Denton, Texas in 1984. I had hoped that my uncle, a cellist teaching at Vanderbilt, would take it up, but this did not happen, and as there was no further interest in this piece I scrapped it. However there was some very good material in the work, especially in the last movement, and I further developed this for jazz band in 1990 as the �Allegro boogerini� movement of the Popular Music of Planet X. (This piece has since been entirely re-written for concert band, without the boogerini, then again re-written for piano quintet, and orchestrated to be Symphony No. 1: PMPX.)
          In the last few years I have started associations with local musicians and performances are now possible for chamber works. I returned to writing a piano trio in February 2010, with a new first movement. Then I took the Allegro boogerini and recast it, condensed from the jazz band version, back into piano trio format, amended and improved, as the final movement, �Devil Music�. Given this evocative title, the first movement turned into �Human Music�, which gave me the great challenge of the middle movement, which had then to be �Angel Music�. (You may notice that my angels tend to be despondent, while the demons have a good time.) This parallels Boethius with his musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis.
          "Pidooma", from the tempo marking of the first movement, is an engineering term denoting the origin of many useful concepts.
          This work is dedicated to my close friends and superb musicians, violinist Eric Pritchard and cellist Bonnie Thron, along with cellist Stephanie Vial and pianist Vincent van Gelder, who with Eric performed the premiere on February 22, 2011 at Duke University. The photograph is from the second performance with Eric, cellist Elizabeth Anderson, and pianist Brandt Fredriksen at Sarah Duke Gardens, August 3, 2022. Eric edited the violin part.

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