“…very moving and original.” No Transmission
“a masterpiece!” Null
“You are one of the 2% of artists to whom Couleurs Jazz Média has made a promise to share... Congrats!” Couleurs Jazz Média
“amazed that you're composing pieces that are nothing short of classical genius work.” Sandhya Surendran
“an elegant and moving piano piece that features a unique combination of pulsating rhythm and emotive expressiveness. We'll feature your music on the 59th edition of our radio show "Noitinha Groove." Rádio Armazém

The Peano Propositions

Debate has long-raged over the primacy of reason or emotion in music. Aesthetic theory is divided into two camps: emotionalism on one side, formalism and contextualism on the other. Named for the mathematician Giuseppe Peano (1858 – 1932), this piece proposes a conclusion to that debate.

Peano made outstanding contributions to the fields of logic and mathematics. Among them, the standard set of axioms describing the phenomena of natural numbers known as the Peano Axioms. Logic relies on fundamentals like "subject" and "negation" to make sense, but also and significantly, on structural elements of form, for example, proposition, argument, and conclusion. Music is more than similar. It makes sense by using fundamentals like melody, harmony, and rhythm, and formal structures like exposition, development, and recapitulation.

Logic is built to express reason, and music—most of it anyway—expresses emotion, but words used in logic, like "negation," carry emotional meaning. Music, like logic, must make sense, but inherently, there is powerful reason in emotion. We may fall in love or become angry based on an illogical fallacy, but that is, nevertheless, the reason for our feeling. Conversely, and despite our fantasy of being capable of emotionless reason, there is powerful emotion in reason. So often, reason and logic are overtaken, if not obliterated by the far more powerful phenomenon of emotion. We would like to think we're guided by reason, but pit reason against emotion and emotion wins every time.

In place of the usual emotional expressions used in scores to guide performance, like "con calore" (with fervor), this score uses terms of logic like "predicate" and "conclusion" to argue the issues at hand. In this piece, my conclusion to the argument comes in the final section to be played in the manner heard in a sweaty Cuban nightclub where the piano player has hands too big to fit the keys and emotions too big to be bound by reason.