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Morton Feldman:

 
Last Pieces (1959)

duration: 8 minutes

Morton Feldman was a friend of John Cage’s ever since the two met in a concert hall foyer, having walked out of a concert just before a performance of a Rachmaninov symphony!

Unlike John Cage,who used chance techniques such as throwing dice to abrogate personal control over a piece, Feldman was more interested in using his ear. Indeed, the difference of approach led Feldman to remark that Cage used chance techniques because he probably felt he had less to lose!

Feldman’s work is able to sustain its interest, often over a long period of time, with comparatively few notes. This is because time seems to become suspended – or, at least, it moves very slowly during a Feldman work.

This effect is enhanced by the fact that the composer surely wrote the quietest music ever, long sounds being directed to be played as extremely softly, others ‘ as soft as possible’. Technically, it has been said that Feldman’s compositional process shows a very keen ear for subtle densities of sounds. It is almost as if he has identified a period of time and is letting us glimpse distant ‘bubbles’on its surface – time becomes the fundamental and the sounds seem to bear in upon it.

The perception of time through music is a very important and extremely interesting study. The selected Piano Pieces you will be hearing are typical of the way the composer worked.


Sohrab Uduman:


Still,Suspended (2000)

duration: 1.30 minutes

Sohrab Uduman (b 1962 Ratnapura, Sri Lanka) is head of Department at the University of Keele. Recent projects include a work for string quartet and live computer transformation commissioned by IRCAM for the Arditti Quartet.

The composer says of his work in general: “ My work deals with organising and giving form to sounds: sounds which are given and sounds which are created anew: sounds which are moved, transformed and shaped in time”

In relation to ‘Still, suspended’ in particular the composer writes ‘There are two types of material: a fast figuration and a chorale-like idea: the first barely changes, whilst the second begins to dissolve over time’

I am conscious of the sequential nature of the two principal ideas and how the material changes its shape over time to a greater or lesser degree. In this, the pedalling and articulation detail is paramount. The performer is almost a detached observer as the material changes before him.



Iannis Xenakis:

 
Evryali (11.07.73)

Dedicated to Marie Francoise Bucquet

duration: 10 minutes

This work continues Xenakis’s interest in using the whole range of the piano more or less simultaneously. There are many very wide chords written out as semiquavers which are physically impossible to play as written by a human player. Having said this, the effort in trying to do the best one can produces a very rich piano effect; much of the sound world to this performer’s mind relates to the sound of the big romantic piano works by people such as Rachmaninov, without,of course, bearing any similarity to the harmonic or melodic style.

There are several instances of a semiquaver chord being repeated but with different arrangements of the notes within each iteration. Xenakis was greatly interested in stochastic techniques and it is likely that the ensuing richness within these repeated chords comes from the application of this approach. 

Although  in strictest terms not possible to play, this work is nevertheless  quite approachable from the listener’s point of view and appears to be more often performed than other works by this composer which include the piano.




Nigel Bartram:


The Lark Ascends (2006)

First performance

duration:13 minutes

I wanted to write a piece, which aurally places the audience in that environment, and recalls my own feelings and responses. It was then suggested to me that I might also consider music from the bird's perspective so I decided to score the piece for two pianos with the second piano inspired by the birds. To this end I have slowed down and transcribed small passages of the skylark song which I recorded in the field.

I have become intrigued by the notion that birds live in a different temporal zone i.e. they can perceive small fragments of time (e.g. spaces between other bird utterances) which we cannot. Slowed down recordings of bird song can enable us to appreciate this to a point, and I have employed this to inspire material for the 'bird' piano and occasionally form part of the pre-recorded material

Structurally the piece is in 4 sections:  The first section is built on the chromatic idea heard in piano one, though the idea has many variants. This leads to a long pause where the pianists are instructed to hold the chord until it dies away and wait some more to listen to the pre-recorded birds for a short while.

The pauses in the otherwise flowing music allows a dynamic to be built between the recorded audio and the piano textures.

The second section is much more lyrical and is in 7/8 time and, particularly piano 1, begins romantically as if in a film. Piano 2 however, works against this and the quick notes of the  agitated skylark music soon return and take over. This section concludes with a shimmering texture between the pianos and another lengthy pause.

The third section begins with slower rising notes (rising in chords and single notes is a key element of the composition- reflecting the movements of the bird) This section gets busier (as more birds take to the air perhaps?) and leads us to the final section which is the broadest and an idea like the opening chords of the Vaughan-Williams ‘Lark Ascending’ is heard and developed in both pianos. Use is made of the sostenuto pedal to create a sustained sound surrounded  by bird-like utterances below and above but which are now distant.

This all leads to one final ‘ascent’ before the piano phrases are broken down to allow the pre-recorded birds to take over. A final shimmering chord is heard in both pianos, and the words of George Meredith come to mind as the bird disappears into the sunlight:





John Stead:


Natural Histories Book 1 - Stone and Water (2005/6)

first UK performance

duration: 17 minutes

These 4 small pieces are the beginning of a series of works devoted to the exploration of natural sounds - water, stones, air, fire, wood etc.. This first part look at the sounds and interaction of pebbles and water. They began life as sketches for a proposed son et lumiere for Harlow Carr Gardens, Yorkshire in 2007.

[1] particles (2.11)

One of the main ideas that run through these pieces - that of particulate fast moving sounds, begins this first piece. Edited, filtered and reverberated the sounds are spatialised creating patterns, curves etc. echoing the patterns of sub atomic particles seen in a Wilson cloud chamber.

[2] esprit de rocher (4.19)

Here the sounds of cascading stones are melded, slowed down and magnified using GRM tools, creating firstly fierce breathy sounds, which half way through suddenly stop to reveal a magnified world in which massive structures move. In many belief systems, so-called inanimate objects like stones, are inhabited by spirits.

[3] Fermat (5.05)

This is the most developed and complex of the 4 pieces. The structures and transformations are governed by the Prime number series ( hence it's title which is the name of the French mathematician who worked on the properties of prime numbers ). It begins in a similar fashion to 'particles', but whereas in 'particles' the rhythmic arabesques are focussed, here they are apparently random and diffuse. After this initial opening the space is engulfed with mobile 'liquid marimba-like' sounds which wax and wane and finally give way to a middle section that reverse-extrapolates sounds of creaking beams into the sounds of falling pebbles.  After two explosive sound objects make their appearance,a slow final section is accompanied by 2 statements of a bell-like resonant cantillation.

[4] zephyrs and sprites (4.01)

L'esprit des dunes (1993/4) by the French spectralist composer Tristan Murrail offers a dry arrid  beautiful space. In this sketch a similar dry environment is filled with zephyrs flying and sprites darting, gradually underpinned with a quiet calm melancholy of desert spaces. 



Jean-Claude Risset:


Elementa (1998)

duration: 22 minutes

Commissionned by the French Ministry of Culture for the fiftieth anniversary of musique concrète  and realized at INA-GRM, Paris (1998), Elementa is deliberately electroacoustic.

Popular electronic music resorts to sampling and mixing : it thus catches up with processes initiated by musique concrète half a century earlier. I am neither connoisseur nor fond of techno, but in this work I have here and there picked up fragments of my own compositions, but mostly sound samples taken from "the very bone of nature" - simple sounds or soundscapes, or more often spectra, atmospheres, impulses, elaborated and inlaid in the musical stuff, or weaved into figures, phrases, developments and sections : a compositional work, but considerate towards the autonomy of organic objects and their dynamics of flux, duration and energy.

The piece evokes the four elements of Empedocle - which corresponds to the four states of matter : solid, liquid, gazeous, ionized (plasma). The sound material consists mostly of recordings of sound phenomena from the four elements. The origin of the sound sources is not hidden: the composition relies upon their connotations and their symbolic implications. The piece also includes sounds synthesized with the Music V program and the Synclavier digital synthesizer, which mimick gaits specific to the four states of matter : "solid" sound objects, fluid textures, eolian and noisy puffs, blows and breaths, "ionized" timbres, shrill, agile and dissociated. From the fire, the vocalizations fo Irène Jarsky and Maria Tegzes emerge as Pythia's incantations. The sounds have been processed and edited in INA-GRM studios, using the Pro Tools et GRM Tools software. The original version is 4-track.

The order of the elements is as follows:

- Aqua.. Our primal liquid medium - evoked by the water and also by the fluidity of melted materials : inharmonic textures that will be solidified into bell-like tones in the fourth section. Water drips, flows, laps, breaks - brook, torrent, river, cataract, all going down to the sea.

- Focus. Fire is ambivalent: warm and terrifying, crackling, quick, blazing, consuming and destructive. Atomized sounds, always moving.The wind sets fire in bushes. The crackling excites resonant filters at its own rhtyhm. The fire grows and seems to flood the flaming vocalizations. At the end, the fire rotates in the direction of the stars - celestial fire balls.

- Aer. The slaps of the flute are echoed by eolian puffs in reeds, overblowing into pipes, the air which both sustains and vibrates, set into motion by insect wings or nozzles. At the end, a round of the seven winds.

- Terra  evokes our vital sphere, with the mineral, vegetal and animal order. The solid state of matter is illustrated through its different forms of vibration: rolling, friction, percussion, creaking, plucking, explosion ... After a long expectancy and a passacaglia of pebbles, everything is rocked:  in an avalanche, even earth and stones flow.

I thank François Bayle, Daniel Teruggi and François Donato.