Beneath The Passing Moonlight

Moonlight has a way of making the familiar feel quietly different.

Beneath The Passing Moonlight captures the beauty of a world transformed by the soft glow of the moon, where shadows deepen and familiar surroundings take on a more mysterious character.

There is something peaceful yet fleeting about moonlight as it moves across the landscape, leaving everything touched by it feeling momentarily changed.

Behind the piece:

Released • October 9 2026

Beneath The Passing Moonlight began quite unexpectedly while I was teaching a student.

We were talking about music theory, and how changing the key can completely alter the character of an idea. I had made up a simple left-hand pattern in A minor, but then said, “I bet this sounds much more interesting in C♯ minor.” I played it and, wow, it did. I grabbed a pencil and quickly wrote down what I had played before the idea disappeared.

After the lesson, and with the teaching day finished, the piece began to take shape. C♯ minor has always had a special place in my musical world, largely because of my love of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and I found myself weaving in little echoes of that familiar right-hand figure. Then came another idea: to bring in the famous passage from Handel’s Passacaglia in the next section, transposed to C♯ minor.

Somehow, the two ideas blended beautifully, and the piece seemed to find its own direction from there. What started as a spontaneous experiment during a theory lesson became something much more complete, and a rather happy musical accident.