Nigel Bartram
Composer, performer and teacher of music at York College
The piece was given its first performance by David Truswell and me in the Ferens Art Gallery on 6th July 2006. Please click here for the related concert notes and a video recording of that performance.
An image showing a view over the ‘Lark’ fields in Barmby Moor, East Yorkshire.
The time is 5.30 AM on an April morning. A pair of microphones are in the foreground ready to capture the bird song as the sun begins to rise...
The following recording (excerpt) inspired the piece. It is lovely that the environment sounds are so busy and contrapuntal, but we only hear layers of birdsong- there is no human activity or presence (apart from myself).It is this world which opens the piece - Larkone
The recordings I made, once slowed down, provided the inspiration and some motivic ideas for the piece – Larktwo. What is surprising, is the upwardly-moving chromaticism within the bird phrases which I made part of the opening piano gesture of the piece. As the concert notes say, the space between the notes is revealed by slowing the recording down. Another technique is to time-stretch the sound which has the advantage of preserving the original pitches. Larkthree is the opening idea for the piano but time stretched and thereby easier to perceive the individual notes at pitch.
Larkfour which features an individual bird shows clearly the incredible variety of the parts of the song, again slowed down so we can appreciate this. Particularly noticeable are the rhythmic variations within and again the chromatic content.
I find all this source material inspirational, and whilst I might use the material motivically, I am not interested in attempting to transcribe long passages of birdsong. I would rather the birds ‘speak’ for themselves in this sense. Here I give a few small bird ideas to piano two.
Three key structural points
The pianos accelerando to the end of section one.The pauses in the otherwise flowing textures allow a dynamic to be built between the recorded audio and the pianos.
A lyrical opening to the second section of the piece is opposed by 'bird' utterances in piano two.
The performance given at the Ferens took a lyrical almost dream-like quality approach to the piano scoring. Perhaps a future performance might involve quicker tempos to allow the bird-song element to be more obvious.
As a composer I learned a lot about writing for 2 pianos- how to make the pianos individual (piano 2 was writtten as a more bird like instrument) but at times seamlessly joining together. Some of the techniques used here will reappear in my next composition for keyboards and piano.
