He's a major composer, one with two quite distinct sides: as an innovator who works in ambient and collage music, and as a quirky and crafty pop songwriter. It's all interesting, but the really amazing things happen when these musical personalities overlap and wear away with each others' surfaces.

When Andrew Cyr asked me to write some music to pair with my piano concerto, Home Stretch, I immediately thought of the spacious, static opening section of the piece and the huge debt it owes to Eno's harmonies and timbres. The result is a 19th-century style "orchestral paraphrase" on the subject of Eno's music, focusing on the albums Before and After Science and Another Green World, with some Apollo by means of an introduction.

Scored for string orchestra, fragile elegy intertwining voices of lament that bring to mind English Renaissance masterpieces of Thomas Tallis and John Dowland.

Within Her Arms is music for my mother, with all my love.

Earth will keep you tight within her arms dear one -
So that tomorrow you will be transformed into flowers -
This flower smiling quietly in this morning field -
This morning you will weep no more dear one -
For we have gone through too deep a night.
This morning, yes, this morning, I kneel down on the green grass -
And I notice your presence.
Flowers, that speak to me in silence.
The message of love and understanding has indeed come.
- Thich Nhat Hanh

My last attempt at a piano concerto was when I was 15, and since then, I've mostly lost interest in the typical "virtuosity for its own sake" soloist versus orchestra dynamic of the genre. Luckily, the Mozart-sized forces led me to approach Home Stretch as chamber music, allowing for more subtle gestures and interplay between musicians.

I also knew I wanted Home Stretch to have something to do with fast cars, which Dave is obsessively interested in. The piece is in three large sections which gradually accelerate: beginning in almost total stasis, working up to an off-kilter dance with stabbing accents, and ushering in a sturm-und-drang cadenza which riles itself up into a perpetual-motion race to the finish. However, there are always little "smudges" of music from each section in the others, sometimes fitting into to their new context, sometimes balefully interrupting.

I was researching the art of italian Futurist Giacomo Balla (right) for a term paper, watching my roommates play a car racing video game called Gran Turismo, and thinking about the legacy of Baroque string virtuosity as a point of departure for my next project. It didn't take long before i felt the resonances between these different activities, and it was out of their unexpected convergence that this piece was born.

Gran Turismo is dedicated to the students of Robert Lipsett, who premiered the work at USC and have since performed it extensively. it is the recipient of the 2005 Leo Kaplan prize from ASCAp.

Inspired by the conception of music as a living art form, Metropolis Ensemble has commissioned Andres to compose new music for the left hand part as well as an entirely new solo cadenza.

The autograph score is currently in the Morgan Library Archive. There is a very unusual feature to this concerto. In addition to omitting the tempi for two of the movements, Mozart also, in Tyson's words, "did not write any notes for the piano's left hand in a great many measures throughout the work." As can be seen in the Dover Publications facsimile, large stretches of the solo part simply have nothing at all for the left hand, including the opening solo (movement 1, measures 81-99) and the whole of the second movement. There is in fact no other Mozart piano concerto of which so much of the solo part was left unfinished by the composer.