It’s high time that we celebrate Joseph Kubera’s thirty-plus years of contributions to contemporary American music. Trained as a classical musician at SUNY Buffalo during the particularly fertile years between 1965 and 1969, Kubera was exposed to Stravinsky, Bartók, Hindemith, and Copland by his piano teacher Leo Smit, as well as to the usual common-practice era repertoire.

The four pieces on this recording include two works written especially for him—Michael Byron’s Book of Horizons (2009) and “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s The Drifter (1994)—and two pieces written independently, but ones that have never been recorded, namely Julius Eastman’s Piano 2 (1986), and Stuart Saunders Smith’s Fences, In Three Tragedies (1998).