Program Note by the Composer:
In 1976 the bassist Gary Karr and his accompanist Harmon Lewis commissioned a set of pieces for bass and, respectively, piano, harpsichord and organ. The original concept was to write a triptych whose three parts would be played one after another, but the organ piece didn't pan out, so I gave up the triptych idea and treated the other two works separately.
River Run, with Harpsichord, is a trance-like, perpetual motion sort of piece, with an almost anti-virtuoso bass part; Stepping Out is considerably more outgoing, not to say flamboyant. It consists of two highly stylized dances (a polka and a tango) followed by a driven, jazz-tinged finale withe plenty of virtuosic passages.
The work was completed on August 18th, 1976, in Lake Hill, New York. It was premiered soon thereafter, but I decided that it needed a bit of revision, and put it on the back burner. As it turned out, more than thirty years passed - funny how that happens - before I got around to putting the revisions in the music and sending it off to the publisher. It was played a number of times in the interim, but now potential performers don't have to worry about reading my less-than-fastidious manuscript hand.
