1. Dreamlike
2. Uncentered
3. Somber
4. Triumphant, Insistent

I have a small electric keyboard here, downtown, in my apartment. It faces out the window toward the street. When I worm out melodies, then, I address a tableau audience. Strangers dig through trash bins for aluminum, their silhouettes made hazy by the morning condensation on my window. Leaves hang, ghostly, in the drafts from passing traffic. Time runs through my fingers and is still.

four preludes for carillon reflects on this tableaux, on the nature of time or time in nature. I wrote it during the pandemic, alone—so it is a lonely piece, and it touches also on space and distance. It returns, obsessively, to a small idée fixe (E♭-D♭-E♭-G♭), which I hear as a "where will you be...?" or a "when I come back...!" or an "I am with you..."—but you, the performer, should hear it as you see fit.

The piece has some structure: it's in four(-ish) parts, each based on a set of metric and harmonic tensions through which I treat the central motive. I draw aesthetic influence from a wide array of composers: Mussorgsky and Mingus, Hisaishi and Holst, Varèse and Vanden Gheyn, to name a few.

I dedicate this composition to Annie Gao, my co-chair and co-conspirator at the Yale University Guild of Carillonneurs; to Ellen Dickinson, my talented instructor; to my roommate Franklin Bertelotti, who has weathered this pandemic with me in good faith and good cheer; and to you, the performer. I hope you enjoy!

—Michael Gancz; February 27, 2021; New Haven, Connecticut