The Album Leaves (2002) are, at least in rough size and shape, character pieces in the 19th-century mold of Schumann, Chopin, or Brahms. This is an idea that has interested me for a long time: the kind of composing that depends not on long-spun narratives or exhaustive development, but on the clarity, pungency, and immediacy of a single, arresting sound-image. It's the kind of composing, too, that aims at maximum contrast between one short movement and the next, not at integrating them into some larger cycle.

-- Steven Stucky