For the Love of Bees is a six-part suite. It was originally composed for Dr. Margaret Lucia in a solo piano version with four parts in 2010. I expanded the piece in 2019 at the request of the director of the Piano on the Rocks Festival, Sandrine Erdely-Sayo as well as adding a spoken narrative in another version. The idea for the piece was generated by my growing awareness of honeybee hive die-offs because of Colony Collapse Disorder. As I learned more about this problem, including interviewing bee specialists at the US Department of Agriculture, I also learned more about bees’ social behavior, other bee species, and their critical role as pollinators.

For each section, I used some of the striking characteristics of bees as a 'natural' metaphor along with a particular pianistic technical challenge in the tradition of the etude. In turn, each section explores a particular compositional/harmonic issue. In various sections, I was also responding to the piano compositions of Debussy, Chopin, Bartok, Messaien and the great Cuban jazz pianist, Chucho Valdés.

"Swarms" uses rapidly iterated clusters of 3-7 notes — a sort of ‘megatrill’ — in a variety of textures in a free atonal musical language. "Sting" is based on rapidly executed lines in step-wise motion contrasted with 'stinging' dyads and rapid ostinati; the perfect 4th is the core interval. “Honey Queen” is based on slow 6-9 note sustained chords with combinations of 2nds, 4ths, 7ths, all in a protracted sense of unresolved stasis. “Myth of the Assassin Bees” is a fast-pulsed and syncopated exploration of virtuosic cross- hand technique with jazz-influenced chords. “Solitary” is a romantic and lyrical exercise in chromatic quasi-tonal harmony. "Ode to Bees and Their Keepers" takes the symmetry of the hive as a metaphor for expanding and contracting figures. It begins at the center of the instrument. These figures expand outward, contract and move variously through the range of the keyboard until the entire range of the instrument is sounding. This last section incorporates echoes of earlier sections — the megatrills of "Swarms", lush chords of “Honey Queen” and “Solitary”, and cross-hand technique of “Myth of the Assassin Bees.”

This piece was premiered by Dr. Margaret Lucia in 2010 at both the University of Maryland Baltimore County and Heidelberg College. She has performed this at multiple conferences and festivals including the International Alliance for Women in Music Conference (Flagstaff, 2011); College Music Society Symposium, Cambridge (2013); Pennsylvania Women Composers Festival (2014); - Conservatorio Teresa Berganza (part of their Semana Cultural, 2017); Conservatorio Adolfo Salazar, Madrid (2017); Conservatori Superior de Musica de les Illes Balears, Palma Majorca (2017); Universidad de Salamanca, Festival Internacional de Primavera (2017); Centro Cultural de Nicholás Samerón (2017); Sala Manuel De Falla, Conservatorio Real de Madrid (2019); Auditorio de Galicia - Santiago de Compostela (2017); Wunderkammer- Villa Bernasconi, Cernobbio (2019). Sections of the piece have also been performed in Baltimore at the Baltimore Composers Forum (2018) by Bonghee Lee.