I never thought music had to be difficult to be meaningful.

When I began working on Sunday, I wanted people to enjoy what they heard. I wanted melodies they could connect with, sounds that reminded them of places they'd been, and music they could return to without needing to understand its structure.

But I also wanted to see how long someone could listen to essentially the same musical idea before something changed in the way they heard it.

That question eventually became an eighty-minute, twenty-movement piano cycle built around the Handel/Halvorsen Passacaglia.

I took the recurring musical foundation into jazz, lo-fi, country, cinematic music, and different acoustic environments. Sometimes I changed the harmony. Sometimes the instrumentation. Sometimes I left the original piano recording untouched and changed everything around it.

In Sunday Prairie Grace, for example, I kept my original piano performance and introduced pedal steel guitar. The way the steel guitar bends and sustains its notes made the piano melody seem to travel farther. Every time I listen, I imagine myself standing in an open field with the wind moving through my hair.

I know that sounds strange. But that's what I hear.

And that's one of the things I love about composing. You can make a musical decision for one reason and discover something else entirely when you listen to the result.

After releasing Sunday, I began corresponding with experimental composer Lucio Capece. He listened to the album and noticed something I hadn't fully articulated.

The music appeared easy to listen to, yet the repeated melody encouraged him to pay attention to the differences among movements.

He described a contradiction between the music's apparent simplicity and the attention it asks of the listener.

That observation stayed with me.

I had spent years trying to make Sunday approachable. I wanted someone who had never studied classical music to enjoy it just as much as someone who recognized Handel.

Yet here was an experimental composer telling me that the very repetition I'd used to create familiarity was also making the listening experience more demanding.

And he wasn't the only one.

During my conversation with Hilary Seabrook on Harmonious World, she described how the footsteps in Sunday Noel made her imagine hearing music in a public space rather than a concert hall. She called the experience “transporting.”

Later, when we discussed attentive listening, she said, “This is not background noise.”

I found that fascinating.

How could music be easy to listen to and yet resist becoming background music?

I'm still thinking about that question.

Perhaps the answer has something to do with familiarity. Once we recognize something, we don't necessarily need to concentrate on identifying it anymore. Our attention becomes free to move elsewhere.

We may notice a breath, a footstep, a subtle change in harmony, or the way one instrument seems to extend another.

Then the familiar melody returns, and we recognize it again.

I don't know whether everyone experiences Sunday this way. My informal listener survey certainly suggests that people respond differently.

But that's part of what interests me.

I began learning piano without owning one. For years, my weekly one-hour lesson was also my only opportunity to practice. Each time I returned to a piece, another week of life had passed.  The music was familiar, but I wasn't quite the same person hearing it.  Perhaps I've been exploring that experience ever since.  And perhaps Sunday is my way of inviting someone else to discover what returning can reveal.

A recording can return perfectly to its beginning.  The listener cannot.

Explore Sunday by Urban Fu$e, available in forward, reverse, and continuous listening editions.