This work, published in Cowell’s quarterly, New Music, stands in the tradition of piano miniatures reaching back to the early nineteenth century. Chopin had published a volume of piano preludes — preludes not introducing anything else, a characteristic Romantic gesture — and Debussy had continued the tradition around 1900. So had the Russian composer and mystic Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915), a particularly potent influence on Crawford’s expressive approach in this “Mystical Andante.”

The work presents a contrapuntal texture of three layers, clearly distinct in pitch. At the beginning we hear, high up, a repeating figure for two parts; this is an ostinato, a repeating pattern that will recur through most of the prelude, if with variation. Soon the second and third layers appear: Rolling chords are heard in the piano’s low register, and a yearning, chromatic melody emerges in the middle range. The harmonies involved are dissonant, offering little sense of tonal center, or tonic.

The music grows louder and gathers intensity, and the ostinato descends to lower pitch levels, converging on the melody below it, to approach a central climax — and a central cadence in the prelude. Then the ostinato resumes at its original high pitch, and the three layers are restored, only to move more quickly than before to another cadence. After this there is a coda, with a twist: Now the ostinato is heard in the low register, with the rolling chords, slower now, high up above.