This week’s email message has a new look. I hope that y’all -- my friends and fans -- find this format easier to access and enjoy. The type is larger, the margins are broader. It’s going to be fun to share photos knowing that the messages will not undue amounts of ‘memory’ and unduly long download times.

Speaking of “new” … today’s email features a new piece of music, completed just a few months ago.

Until today this new piece of music I want to share with you has been heard by no one except myself, the musician who recorded it and my good wife … who said she liked it. The title is “Far and Near.”

Why that title? Let me explain.

“Far and Near” opens with a F sharp minor chord, aggressively rising and then falling. It rapidly runs through an improbable series of notes. Where are we going? Somewhere quite FAR from where we began. And we’re moving QUICKLY! By measure 6, we are solidly in C major.

That is the largest possible leap music can make. From F sharp to C, a tritone apart, opposite poles on the Circle of Fifths. And from minor and major, yet! It makes, I think, an exciting introduction.

Having found the key where it wants to be, the piece settles into the first theme. A contrasting second theme follows. A “development” section. A recapitulation and a coda. The movement, after having begun so unconventionally, turns out to be a standard example of what is called “sonata allegro” form.

In the final bars, the patterns that opened the piece return, framing the whole. Hearing this piece, we have “traveled” both “far and near” -- as far away as F sharp minor and as near to home as good old C major.

Now that you know what the title means, please listen to cellist Randy Calistri Yeh’s dramatic rendering of “Far and Near” by clicking on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.