The Inner Landscape was written in 2018 for piano and cello. The piece began with an image of autumn and with an attraction to the particular atmosphere of the season — clear, distant and reflective.
The harmonic language remains within a tonal field, but repeatedly loosens its attachment to a stable center. Chromatic departures, tonicizations and shifts into more remote harmonic regions create a sense of suspension and uncertainty. Major- and minor-mode colors also move through one another, so the music is never fully detached from tonality, yet rarely feels completely settled within it.
The music developed from a state of sustained thought and uncertainty. Ideas return, hesitate and shift direction rather than moving toward an immediate resolution. Beneath this is an emotional tension between distance and attachment: the impulse to approach something that seems present, while remaining unable, or unwilling, to define it completely. The “landscape” of the title is therefore less an external scene than an interior one — a way of giving musical form to reflection, restraint and feeling held in suspension.