Fredric Joseph Kroll (born February 7, 1945, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American-German composer and writer. He was born in 1945 as the only child of the piano teacher and schoolteacher Alexander Kroll, born in New York as the fourth child of White Russian Jewish immigrants, and the elementary school teacher Sarah Kroll, née Mahler, born in Warsaw. At the age of eleven, he began to compose a cycle of 30 piano pieces in all tonalities, including the enharmonic relationships, to explore the potentials of each tonality to express different emotions. He called them “Episodes,” in order to distinguish them from Chopin's “Préludes.” Although of uneven quality, they represent a quarry of thematic material (partially with Russian Jewish flavor) from which Kroll was later to draw in his magnum op