Diya Bella Variations

The title is of course a terrible pun on Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, but seemed particularly apt in that it’s Italian for “beautiful Diya,” and this piece is dedicated to Diya Banerjee, whose remarkable calm, deep knowledge, and faithful presence provided immeasurable support through some of the most physically and emotionally difficult times of my life.

Comprising a set of twenty-four variations on the basic thematic material of Diya’s husband (and my close friend) Timo Andres’s short piano piece Heavy Sleep, this work fractally recapitulates Timo’s theme at various levels while moving through increasingly complex variations, each of which additionally comprises four assorted and sundry individual versions of that variation’s basic musical idea, and which at intervals themselves combine to create larger “variations of variations.”

Principally inspired by Beethoven’s Diabelli and Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated, Diya Bella Variations was completed on Christmas Day 2024 and lasts between forty and forty-five minutes.