For Jack was written in 2024 for pianist Jack Yarbrough. I was inspired by Jack’s many performances of my music; how he approaches my soundworld with a beauty of touch and an attention to pacing. This piece is approximately 50 minutes long and, with a few exceptions, it is extremely quiet and spacious. Many thanks to Jack for asking me to write this piece and for playing it so beautifully.

Jack Yarbrough is a pianist working in the fields of contemporary and experimental music. Largely devoted to the solo piano recital as a means of temporal and perceptual expansion, Jack has commissioned several large scale works with the goal of revitalizing piano repertoire in the face of its increasing obsolescence. He has collaborated closely with composers including Timothy McCormack, Bunita Marcus, Richard Barrett, Marti Epstein, Linda Catlin Smith, and Makiko Nishikaze. Born outside of Birmingham, Alabama, Jack currently resides in Ithaca, NY. He holds a Masters of Music in contemporary chamber music performance from the Boston Conservatory and a Bachelor of Music from the University of Kansas. Jack is completing a Doctorate of Musical Arts in performance practice at Cornell University, where he is a Sage fellow. Jack’s teachers include Stephen Drury, Xak Bjerken, Michael Kirkendoll and Jack Winerock. His recordings can be heard on Another Timbre and Sawyer Editions.

Marti Epstein is a Boston-based composer whose music has been performed by the San Francisco Symphony, The Radio Symphony Orchestra of Frankfurt, Ensemble Modern, Trinity Wall Street, and the Boston Symphony Chamber Players. She has completed commissions for the Fromm Foundation, The Munich Biennale, the Ludovico Ensemble, Guerilla Opera, the Radius Ensemble, Tanglewood Music Center, Winsor Music, Boston Opera Collaborative, Callithumpian Consort, Hinge, loadbang, and Collage New Music. In 2020, Marti was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Nebraska Impromptu, an album of Marti’s chamber music for clarinet, was recently released on New Focus Recordings and features clarinetist Rane Moore and members of WInsor Music. Marti is Professor of Composition at Berklee College of Music/Boston Conservatory of Music.