Professor of Piano and Piano Pedagogy and Director of Graduate Studies Jessica Johnson recently produced a video featuring Missy Mazzoli’s Isabelle Eberhardt Dreams of Pianos. Johnson filmed the piece in Collins Recital Hall at the Hamel Music Center on a DS Standard 5.5 keyboard.

According to the notes, “Isabelle Eberhardt was an explorer and writer who, at the beginning of the 20th century, abandoned a comfortable aristocratic life for a nomadic existence in North Africa. She was a liberated individual who rejected conventional European morality in favor of her own path. She died in a desert flash flood at the age of 27.

Isabelle Eberhardt Dreams of Pianos imagines her riding on horseback through the desert, lost in thought, remembering sounds and sensations of her old life. Fragments of Schubert’s A Major Sonata pierce her consciousness and are quickly suppressed. In her fatigue she dreams of a piano half-buried in sand, a flash flood of sheet music swirling around her.”