Resonance Studies

I've already posted about a couple of aspects of my current project - exploring the resonance, spectral and microtonal aspects of the piano. I'm fascinated by the basic tension that exists between 88 keys at least nominally - they aren't really - all the same distance apart from each other, and resonances that aren't part of the equal-temperment compromise. In turn, this seems to have really interesting consequences for ideas like cause and effect - the cause (what's played) is in one harmonic place, the effect (the resonance) is in another.

The 5 short solo piano pieces that I wrote last year were a kind of preparation for a big piano and ensemble piece that will be played by Roderick Chadwick and Ensemble Plus-Minus at King's Place on October 15th. Here are 3 of them from their, first performance:




They don't all withstand recording, at least like this, very well, so lots of things disappear... A somewhat better quality recording of all 5 (uncompressed so a very large file), and the score are both available from the sidebar.

Spectral Piano Day

on February 3rd, Roderick Chadwick and me are organising an event about the piano and spectralism, resonance, and the overtone series, at the Royal Academy. This work has been the basis for my Resonance Studies, which will get their second outing, and is getting its next incarnation in an expansion of those pieces with an ensemble as well that will be played by +- this October.

There will be a couple of talking sessions, also including the composer Newton Armstrong. we'll talk about both our own pieces and some of the precedents for them, from Chopin and Liszt to Stockhausen and Lachenmann. In the evening there will be a concert including 3 wonderful student pianists at the RAM - Florian Mitrea, Chris Ma and Karim Said - as well as Roderick, and the programme will be:

Horatio Radelescu - Piano Sonata No.4
Newton Armstrong - Too Slow
Alex Hills - 5 Resonance Studies

Liszt - Funerailles
Helmut Lachenmann - Serynade

Full details are on the RAM website here.

1958-1961 in San Francisco

A concert coming up in San Francisco - a new quintet, 1958-1961, will be played by EARPLAY on February 6th. The piece is a sort of conceptual cover of various aspect of Ornette Coleman's seminal albums from that period - especially the great great Lonely Woman, and the equally stunning but more epic Free Jazz. Here's Lonely Woman:



And more details of the concert are here.

5 Resonance Studies - London Nov 29th

A new work - 5 short pieces exploring different aspects of the piano's resonance - will get their premiere on Nov.29th, by the wonderful Roderick Chadwick as part of an Ensemble +- concert at City University. More details about the concert are available here:

http://www.city.ac.uk/events/2011/nov/plus-minus

These are sort of preparatory pieces for a much larger work, including ensemble and electronics as well, that will get its first performance with Roderick and +- in October next year at Kings Place.

Some States Can Be Resolved Rhythmically

Here's a video (with a few missing second very near the beginning for the keen eared!!) of this little duo from Kammer Klang last month. Many many thanks to Lucy and Aisha for the wonderful playing.

Past and Future Politics in Pop

I'm about to slightly repeat myself here, with respect to the analysis of Ghost Town that I wrote about a few weeks ago, but the example I've found to pair with it is so good that I don't care...! These two songs are both political protest songs - Ghost Town (1981) about race relations in the depressed, early-Thatcher UK, and California Uber Alles about what the Dead Kennedys saw (rather hyperbolically!!) as the hippy fascist Jerry Brown, who was about to be re-elected as Governor of California in 1979 and had Presidental ambitions. What goes around comes around, literally in the case of Jerry Brown, who is Governor again!!

This is all well and good, but what I'm interested in is the way both songs project outside their focus on current events, and how this fits with the music. Ghost Town steps back into the past, for a middle 8 that reflects on how the Coventry dance clubs - now empty, like a Ghost Town - used to be thriving and multi-racial:

Do you remember the good old days
Before the ghost town?
We danced and sang,
And the music played inna da Boomtown



What is remarkable about this temporal digression is that it is mirrored in by the music. The beginning of the song prepares C minor - its tonic - through a series of diminished chords. The same sequence - starting at 1.17 in the video - prepares the middle eight, but instead of C minor, it leaps to F# major, over a C# pedal, as great a harmonic displacement as one can have. This moment is very brief however, and it leaps back, via a G7 chord, into C min again.

So, here, 'alien' harmony serves to represent a utopic past tense as a critique of the present. A very similar critique is made by opposite means in California Uber Alles. The jump here is into the future, and a dystopic one at that. This begins in the present (1979), and the first person. Jerry Brown is telling us what will happen if he is reelected as Governor, as a launchpad for the Presidency - basically California as a proto-fascist state and model for the rest of America, albeit one with hippies as the master-race. At 1.58, though, the song slows down radically, without changing the riff, and the lyrics move forward to 1984, which would have been both the end of Brown's term as Governer, hypothetically the beginning of his as President, and conveniently Orwellian :



Now it is 1984
Knock-knock at your front door
It's the suede/denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece

Come quietly to the camp
You'd look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don't you worry, it's only a shower
For your clothes here's a pretty flower.

This whole, double length, verse becomes a massive accelerando, returning us to the originial tempo - although not the original timeframe, for the final verse. So this is a slightly less 'pure' digression than Ghost Town, which returns to it's original temporal place as it returns to the tonic. However, the relationship between them are really fascinating to me - the similarities of intent and attitude, the differences of means.

Both are using time to be political, and written only 2 years apart. Ghost Town uses harmonic displacement to contrast a happy past with the bad present, whereas California Uber Alles temporal distortion (interestingly, slowing down to move forward) to suggest that the present could entail a catastrophic future.

I'm often banging on, when talking about the relationship between music and narrative, about the inability of music to do tense, that musical time is always operating in a - albeit radically intensified and constantly linked to what has been and will be - present, and I still believe that music on its own can't tell us 'it is happening in another time'. But these songs show how music and lyrics can work together to create time structure in ways that are really fascinating. Any other good examples anyone?

Shklovsky, Digression and Coin-Operated Boy

Last month I gave a rather dense paper called 'Enstrangement and the Narrative Frame', about, loosely, the shared nature of musical and literary digression, and how the theories of Viktor Shklovsky - the same thinker who inspired Everything in Life Can Be Montaged - helps us to understand this. A pdf of the full paper can be downloaded from the sidebar. Part of it, however, is about popular music, and works better with video, so I thought I'd put that up here directly. It's a little long, so click on the title above for the continuation.