It is quite appropriate that if Chopin has his “Ocean” etude, mine should be but a Ripple.

Yet it is precisely in this respect– namely, in the regime of the merest minute and droplet-sized– that the modest work here presented aspires to delve, however fathomably shallow the puddle of its aim. For whereas the great billows of the sea froth and meld and subsume with indeterminate array, energized by the mightiest terrestrial and heavenly forces at work; so those same forces, when distilled into the gentle fall of a single drop into some tranquil pool, will produce upon its surface the most sublimely clear and symmetrically radiant emanations of undulating silver ever beheld by nature.

My mother once similarly observed that though the mighty tides of our world may induce leviathan swells of change on the grandest scale; yet a mere droplet of kindness, or authenticity, when love would still the surface of our turbulent lives, has the potential to ripple outward and set radiant, shimmering positivity astir in all directions. It is this latter rippling that the music herein chiefly seeks to manifest; and whatever waves it may energize, let it be known that from her spigot came the first drop.