Scarlet Dance

Poe's The Masque of the Red Death has haunted me since childhood, and when I set out to write for harpsichord, the connection felt inevitable. The instrument's dark, metallic timbre and its deep associations with an older world seemed to call out for Poe's stark, relentless prose. The piece is built almost entirely from a single scale and the minor seventh chords it naturally yields—a deliberately limited harmonic palette designed to sustain tension from the first note to the last. The listener is invited into something dizzying and grotesque: a dance that cannot stop.