PIANO WORKS (2021–2023)
See EP (2023) for the evolution of this project.
The ideas in this set have occupied me in some form for the duration of my time as a composer endeavours. In 2021 I started to write for the piano with increasing frequency and found that, at this stage in my career, for various reasons the ability to write, perform and record music for myself without needing to rely on funding, equipment or other outside support held significant appeal. As my ideas for planned pieces began to grow, I saw that the common strands between them held potential for a full programme, and completion of this project is now my main area of focus.
The intention is to perform or even tour these pieces as a full set, though through work on them I am growing as a composer and performer meaning that the development stage is itself an inherently valuable endeavour.
Inoculum
A late addition to the set. The opening piece of the programme features some of the structural techniques I developed in planning for Struggle and makes stark use of the Chopin-esque A-B-A format (see the F major nocturne and ballade) I sort of had in mind for Allargando (though that piece was ultimately binary rather than ternary) where the B section is a wild tempestuous episode that yields to the placidity of the A section.
06/07 - A-section is almost complete. First image below shows the harmonic structure I devised. I'm a big of fan of forms of a 'circular' nature, or ones that are 'closed' in that it is possible to reach the starting point by following a sequence and have a clear and logical end point. Here, partly as a result of being fresh off composing my Song Without Words and partly arbitrarily due to the ideas slapped together in the voice notes below (all my ideas for the A-section just so happen to be separated by a major third), I've revisited mediant modulations and devised a structure that moves by thirds, but with a difference: the key that is reached as a result of these modulatory slip-n-slides is a semitone higher than the one before it, a rise that has its own particular aural effect. Important, I think, is that this happens without it sounding too 'weird'. G minor to G-sharp minor, for example (the first modulation in the sequence), is achieved through the use of only three chords, yet doesn't contain any single particularly abrupt shift. G minor to B major does sound weird, but G minor to Eb minor is less weird, while Eb minor to B major is of course entirely tonally cromulent. There is a kind of illusory transitivity between the outer chords, to borrow a rather handsome phrase from Umberto Eco.
The outline shows that I mostly cycle through keys by using a minor iv chord as a pivot (a bit of variation in the middle breaks up what would become a rather predictable sequence and has the more complicated function of helping the sequence to end where I wanted it to). Though it doesn't make strict tonal sense, it has the charm of sounding either more or less of an abrupt shift depending on the harmonic choices I make around it. With this as my frame I crudely inflicted a serviceable sequence of narrative shifts on to it and made my compositional choices accordingly.
I've used the technique I developed in Struggle Phase 1 below of offsetting an irregular metre(s) with one in strict 4/4. The second image below shows the outline at that stage. Lower staff shows the 4/4 metre (apologies for poor beaming, it's the result of copy and pasting), while the middle staff shows the beginning of my work writing the left-hand part. That rhythmic motif will feature throughout.
The B-section—in the a riff on the old contrast shtick I used in Perpetually Receding Horizon below—will be composed mostly through improvisation so that it retains that feel while being performed.
20/07 - A-section has been finished for quite a while, but it's far too good for me to sit on. While I'm learning it, here is a placeholder MIDI recording (I played the intro. This will be the first thing I play when I walk on stage to perform this stuff in the future, so I wanted something that would allow me test the piano out and give me an opportunity to get rid of my nerves. That's how far ahead I'm thinking).
22/02 - I've had occasional opportunities to get stuck back into Innoculum but the B-section is still eluding me. When I do it, I'm going to have to go all in. I'm seeing that it can't just be improvised and it's going to have to be very detailed and make heavy use of technique to be convincing. When the time comes to finish it, I'll have to make it my obsession and spend days on it until it's done. I'm trying to create a 'rising' tremolo, so I need to figure out some intersection between note sequences that create the sound I want doable hand position movements. I'll need three layers: the low rumble and the arpeggio that starts the section and has to continue running throughout, and the high chords. Then I need to figure out how to create that convincing 'end' point given that it's chromatic, and decide which key the reprise is in.
I'm adding an update to this because, following the recording of Struggle Prelude in January, a lot of things have been cast into doubt. I'm feeling a bit doom about everything musical and non-musical at the moment and don't have the mental resources and fortitude to compose as I was last year. When I am able to start again, I want to make this and Retribution V (see Retribution III section below) my priority. The reason for that is I believe that those two along with Struggle Prelude would make a very, very good short programme. The recording session for the latter made me realise that, as long as I'm properly practiced, I probably could perform to a modestly-sized group of people. Those three pieces, possibly a couple of shorter ones thrown in as well, would make a strong EP and a filmed performance would be a massive step in helping people understand my vision and and what the album could be.
Perpetually Receding Horizon
I’m slightly obsessed with Takemitsu’s Romance for piano, and wanted to do something that would allow me to spend some extended time in that sound world.
At the same time, I wanted it to be big, and it seemed like a good opportunity to do what I had done only in student pieces until then and contrast not just texture, motifs and/or style between sections, but of compositional techniques and indeed even musical ideological bases. I had in mind something that would flick between sections and material without much regard really for how they fit together, eschewing the balance and cohesiveness I usually labour over. I had in mind a semi-improvisational section, perhaps with just an instruction-based score, offset against a rigorously mechanical, fully-scored section with a clearly unfolding audible process a la Glass’ Music in Fifths.
I was interested in the effect this would have on a performer, as there is a mental shift that takes place when switching between scores that are ‘transactional’ and require input and improvisation (I’m suggesting here that fully-scored music requires no input from the performer but humour me for the sake of this piece) and ones that can be fully sight-read, and thought that having it take place within a single piece was an interesting basis for a composition.
In the end, I had to trade some of the loftier ideas I had for it for the more favourable fact of it being finished. The score retains something of the improvisational instructions I had in mind, though not to the extent I would have liked (the score was supposed to be a part of the composition, not just a piece of accompanying material, but is now largely conventional). I wasn’t able to develop the compositional system I had in mind for the mechanical section (I was sure there was a way I could serialise all of the semitones contained in the pentatonic scale I’m using in a way that would still sound Takemitsu-esque, but wasn’t able to get there), but I did compose something that sounds ‘process-y’, if you see what I’m getting at with that word.
Retribution II
Insofar as there can be said to be a common thread among my Retribution pieces, it is the opportunity to indulge the more gratuitous aspects of my compositional style, particularly my inclination for drama and bombast. Justifying this indulgence necessitates depth and complexity in other areas of the music, and they are therefore fairly ambitious in scale.
I think I may have a hit on my hands here. It started with a little bit of elaboration of a melody found in Leonard Cohen’s Love Calls You By Your Name, but formal demands led to me acquiring a palette of melodic material that I am quite fond of. I am to offset the completed section with one based on the tropes and idioms of a style of electronic music I am hesitant to attempt to label, but which is exhibited best for me in the work of sayk_ and even more better in his track Cut . My compositional task will then be to figure out how these two sections relate and find my back to the starting material for a doubtless cool and extravagant finale.
In a dubious but just about tenable additional evocation of Leonard Cohen, I will lean heavily on one of my few musical ‘chops’ in this piece (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Z_X4CSV4E, around 3:25), my fairly dexterous ability to play repeated notes gained from playing Glass’ Etude 6 incessantly as a novice pianist. In so doing I will be able to replicate the rapid kick-drum rhythms heard in Cut.
Retribution III
Another piece that started as a fragment of an idea but has expanded into something quite substantial. I am trying to evoke a very particular feeling with this piece, and am taking time to let it breathe and for a form to emerge so as to avoid imposing my compositional habits on to it. The Retribution moniker means that it will contain grandiosity in abundance, and I am seeking modal shifts that will allow me to create something that will feel like a hyperbeam cannon of good-vibe energy in defiance of the minor feel I usually reach for.
I might loosely describe it as ‘pastoral’ in nature. I'm returning to the arpeggio/bass-melody technique I employed in Allargando but to more playable and manageable effect.
13/07 - I have a solid opening. I'm taking a slightly different approach with this piece as I don't really have a view of the form as a whole and really don't know where it's going at this stage. But obstacles provide opportunities for growth.
I've gathered a lot of ideas and material but not yet sure how it's going to be put together. I had something episodic in mind (again, 'pastoral'--see Beethoven), where I flick wistfully through a series of pleasing little thematic areas. I thought I'd hit on the jackpot when I thought of copying the finale of the Jupiter symphony where it turns out, likely to gasps from the audience, that all of my themes that had appeared unrelated at first actually all fit together perfectly, but I wonder whether that isn't overkill when this piece should be one of the more lyrical and less intense of the set. Anyway, I gather that what I'm going to be doing is adding contrapuntal density throughout in the lead up to whatever climax I come up with.
Another idea I had, though, which was a joke until it started proving useful, was to move into what I've termed the 'turbo' major. While horsing around with the mediant harmony and jumps in Song Without Words, I realised that some of the progressions I happened upon sounded more major-y than the major scale. I imagined what it would feel like to brighten up by moving into the major, but then move up even further into the turbo major and get even more bright. Imagining this concept is actually proving rewarding, so the climax may well feature a leap into to the turbo major where all the stuff is repeated but sounds even more cool. That could, as they say, be a thing.
Important for me is the fact that I've subsumed an idea for a piece I came up with probably ten years ago and have attempted at various stages to flesh out since then into this piece, kind of a little tribute to myself and the commitment I've maintained to my vision across this time. The idea starts at b. 59 in the score snippet below.
That little recycled idea will be the basis of the reprise later in the set. Details down page.
22/02/2023 - Retribution III will probably not be on the album. I was feeling pretty good in December with the World Cup on and having somehow pulled the conference off, and during the uplift I started absent-minded work on something that I now like more than the idea for Retribution III. It started as little fragment of an idea during an improvisation, but after I orchestrated it into the little snippet below, possibilities for a big piece revealed themselves.
I was just messing around when I made that, but that's not the point--what I would have done had I carried on with it is continued the textural development. Imagine the harmonic and melodic material remain static but the texture keeps thickening, the strings keep getting louder, it gets brighter, people start hitting bells and cymbals and stuff and it ends in this massive glorious bonanza of colour and gold and fun. Well, something like that. The idea for this piece was to try to translate that to the piano, of really trying to evoke different orchestrations through piano writing and place the complexity in that domain. Of course the limits of the piano mean that it would be difficult to sustain interest through a long-ish piece by doing that alone, since you don't have the option of generating novelty by the introduction of one or a combination of a vast many choices of instrument, but there is to be a general thrust of textural development.
Long story short, this is now Retribution V (since it didn't feel like a Retribution IV. That'll have to be a fabled 'lost' piece that I'll write later. Scarcity sells (Retribution III will also now have to come later, and the reprise later may well further seal the scarcity)). I've got a lot of interesting stuff, but the point I'm at now is writing the requisite dramatic section. I have a phrase I'm using as a kind of prompt, which suggested itself after I found that too much drama wasn't right for the piece: the right kind of turmoil. It has to be the right kind of turmoil. Not too much. I don't quite know how I'm going to end it yet (I have the perfect way to get back to the starting material a la the improv below), but at the end of that the motif from the start would have been heard so much that restating it would seem banal, and going bigger would be overkill given that a) there will have just been a loud dramatic section b) I already built and developed it the first time round as per the entire point of the piece. I may have composed myself into a corner, but I'm sure a non-obvious solution will be revealed by the time I get there.
Below is the score so far.
Song Without Words
The next to be completed. Score is under review but marks a little space I've carved out for myself to be unashamedly lyrical and melodic.
This piece has been the most difficult of the set so far to work on, probably because its relative simplicity led me to believe that its composition would be light work. Attempts to extract form from my material caused me to abandon work and start over several times, but I have settled on something essentially binary nature that employs the teleology that is prevalent elsewhere in my music.
I’m very fond of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words in particular, and work on this piece allowed me to satiate a long-harboured desire to work in the genre myself. Still, the result will bear little resemblance to the form established by Mendelssohn et al. Haters will say I simply don’t understand the form well enough or gracelessly slapped the title on to something I happened to be working on anyway, but the kinds of people I like will call it a clever subversion of the form.
09/05 - Final touches are being added to score. This is a far more ambitious piece than I originally intended but a final version will be ready very soon.
23/05 - The voice memo below is the fairly simple idea that spawned this piece. Four things informed the piece that it became: first, the call-and-response between registers. I saw that if I were to work with this idea as it was, this motivic idea would have to be present throughout. Second, there is a degree of ambiguity about it between B major and G# minor. I would have to decide whether I was going to commit to a key, or whether this ambiguity is something I would invite. Third, I immediately faced a challenge in trying to figure out what the left hand was supposed to be doing even in this fragment. The use of full chords in the right hand means that much of what could be added in the left hand part isn't necessarily contrapuntally 'correct', which remains the case in the finished piece. I did wonder for a little while whether this might not be an opportunity to re-enact Prince stripping the bass track from When Doves Cry and write the piece without a left-hand part at all. Finally, it is unashamedly lyrical, which I decided made it the perfect candidate for the Song Without Words I was planning to write.
Structurally, the piece offsets my original idea with a theme in the parallel minor heard first in b. 34. This secondary theme retains the high-low hocketing motif, though in a different context: it is not melodic, and the chromatic descent provides a number of structural possibilities that make many of the later developments possible. The first time we enter this thematic area, the theme is developed texturally with each repetition before being recontextualised in the parallel major. The second time, beginning in b. 69, it descends beyond the note at which the listener expects it to turn around and start again after hearing it so often the first time around, now descending to G# and presenting the theme in the relative minor rather than the parallel.
A note on the modulations here. It will perhaps have been noted by anybody with a passing interest in music theory that the piece does not start in the key it is ostensibly in (B major). This is no accident--as I attempt to expand my musical language, I've had it frequently suggested to me that working with mediants is the avenue to becoming a more polished and dexterous composer. I allowed this piece to be a space in which I could experiment with mediant modulation, and thus the short introduction in a key that will remain omnipresent once it is heard--Ab major.
Mediant movement in general is present throughout, particularly in the organisation of keys the secondary theme passes through the second time it is heard (starting in G# minor, which is of course a third away from B). I don't feel the jump to Ab major after the main theme returns towards the end of the piece is executed too gratuitously.
Bit of a mammoth piece considering what it started as, but I'm very excited to get it memorised so I can assault some ears with the big crunchy chords in the middle section.
Retribution III (Reprise)
What this old horse is trying to do with this set of works is provide a spiteful, bitter repudiation of what has been termed the 'playlist' approach to making music, but which could, more broadly, be called the drive for content creation, or, more broadly still, the Faustian promise that you don't need to trouble yourself with antiquated values like synthesis, formal cohesiveness, long-range planning or anything a single tier above immediacy if you're in the business of creativity.
The very fact that this set will, upon completion, have kind of been the product of around a decade's worth of work, and that some of the pieces are long, demanding and not easily digestible is kind of the point. This is a deliberately, stubbornly dense work, and much of the labour has gone into formal planning, or rather into answering the question of how I can plausibly sustain cohesiveness and listener interest over the period of time I'm planning for.
You know all the old 'everybody nowadays' chestnuts—nobody pays attention to anything more because our attention spans have been decimated, everybody is too busy staring at their phones, etc. What I'm attempting to do here, i.e. make something that kind of needs to be listened to as a whole and only yields its rewards if earnest investment is made on behalf of the listener, appears to run counter to what business astuteness dictates is the most sensible approach to making music.
I may well be a man with a fork in a world of soup, but actually I think listeners deserve more credit. What people really respond to is somebody working hard at something they really care about and doing it well. And, anyway, the route to success that gives the best chance of retaining your dignity and self-respect is in my view to do whatever everybody else isn't doing. Long-term, I'm imaging my musical career resembling Stewart Lee's approach to touring and promoting independently, which, he says, makes having a career as a touring comedian manageable if he is able to get a modest and consistent fanbase of 4,000 people to pay to see him once a year. I can have a career as a composer if I can at least reach a similarly modest audience. I don't need to concern myself with algorithms and social media marketing.
Having said that, every choice made in the development of this set has been made with a view to achieving this aim. I have demonstrated that I am capable of composing at a high level, but have avoided doing so while being needlessly academic here. I have kept programming in mind throughout the composition stage so that it can, eventually, serve as both an album and a live performance (a good one). I keep myself looking cool and hot at all times so that I myself will be another draw when the time comes.
Perhaps most importantly, though, I do have one eye on how it could be marketed: every album need a lead single, and pieces like this and Allargando will serve as the 'gateway' the rest of the music. Apart from serving as the tying up of a bit of a personal loose end in the form of completing a piece I started a decade ago, before I'd really started composing, before I was really even capable of playing the piano for that matter, and providing formal balance in the programme as a whole (Struggle will be heavy stuff), this short piece will allow me to place one foot in the lite solo-piano music world for which there is much demand.
This'll be the one that amateur pianists can play, and the one I might well make a handsome sum from as I violently police the internet to remove illegal copies of the score so that people have to head to Sheet Music Direct or whatever (capitalism—1). It will demonstrate that I could, if I wanted, choose only to write music like this, but I'm choosing not to for purposes of dignity. One should endeavour always to keep in mind the three Cs of music—dedication and practice.
(In a remarkable plot twist, I have managed to unearth the original voice note I recorded of the idea in 2013. When this whole thing is done, it will indeed technically have been almost ten years of work from the first idea to the writing of the last note).
Allargando (short version)
In a hypothetical performance, my intuition is that there would be space something light before the onset of the fairly weighty Struggle. The first half of Allargando (before all the arpeggios) doesn't work too badly as a standalone piece at all, and therefore warrants inclusion in this set.
Struggle
The programme will conclude with Struggle. This is perhaps my most ambitious work in any medium to date, owing largely to the fact that I am going to perform it myself rather than making demands of other musicians. Its origins lie in many threads of my compositional style that have made their way into various of my works. I was present at a full performance of Glass' Music in Twelve Parts at Southbank Centre in 2013, and I have spent a great deal of time since then obsessively trying to figure out a way of replicating the expanding-answering-phrase form of the final two parts. This can be gleaned in the third section of Perpetually Receding Horizon, for example, which was an attempt to build and sustain tension across a prolonged period of time, as was the compositional outline of Plight and Never Mind. I have a taste for fractured, angular rhythms, probably also acquired from the twos-and-threes of those early Glass works, that has been exhibited in those same pieces as well as in Nausea.
In each of those cases my ambition was, at least at some point, to find a means of formalising my tastes and developing a compositional scheme that would be self-contained and capable of sustaining listener interest over significant periods of time. Beyond the obvious influence stated above, this ambition is not without precedent—Reich’s Four Organs, for example, was described by the composer as the ‘the longest V–I cadence in the history of Western Music’, and, though I seem unable to verify it, I seem to recall Michael Nyman in his ever creative parlance likening it to an ‘extended prick tease’ (at least one other publication seems to share this memory: https://www.walesartsreview.org/michael-nyman-collected-writings-edited-by-pwyll-ap-sion). In my own case, I felt that in each case I didn’t quite manage to hit upon that single, coherent, self-contained system that would make my ambition possible to a satisfactory degree.
I believe I have found the solution not just in a change of technique, but of a total change of compositional approach. Work is proceeding in the form of short, pedagogical pieces that I compose unselfconsciously to explore and flesh out a single idea that I believe may be important to the final piece. In this manner, I will amass ideas and techniques and make discoveries that I will compile to build the final piece.
Prelude
One of my most cherished works to date. I'm taking special care with it to make every note perfect, but below is a little preview of the opening. I'm having to ask myself serious questions about how badly I'm plagiarising the funeral march from Chopin's second sonata, but I've concluded that I'm mostly plagiarising myself which is totally allowed.
It started as a strict passacaglia but I'm not sure how much it will resemble that when it's finished. The plan to re-visit the 'elliptical' form of Variations, with it rising in energy towards it peak at the midpoint and then descending back towards placidity at the finale. I wanted the kind of relentless feel this would give where no matter what happens above it that bassline continues mechanically and uninterrupted, but, again practically this might not be feasible. The finished version will retain the legacy of these ideas but with some compromises made for musical purposes.
24/08 - I've taken very special care with this piece. After much revision and practice, I have what I believe to be the final version of the piece that will win me some fans. I have a prospective date of the 24th September to record it at Strongroom Studios in Shoreditch.
27/01/2023
I had a recording session at Strongroom Studios on 14/01/2023. I recorded Struggle Prelude and the recording is now mixed, mastered, and available online. This is the first step in recording the album.
Music is a lot of work for little reward. The session was an educational experience and right now achieving my vision feels more unlikely than it did before I started this project. While I have faith in the quality of my compositions and know that I can play, right now I know that I do not stand out from everybody else trying to make music. My next step is to work on the design and visual element of my performances so I can really start to try building a fan base. I have even further to go than I thought.
Phase 1
I found the solution to the rhythmic problem I've been unable to solve in a perhaps unlikely source. I discovered in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwrSvpjdK-w&t=666s that bands like Meshuggah have been composing with the kind of rhythmic schemes I had in mind not only for a long time, but to an extent that I often find difficult to make complete sense of.
Skipping to 10:20 in the above video shows the idea that I borrowed. The rhythmic scheme employed in the part of Clockworks discussed there contains a repeated phrase offset by an answering phrase that increases in duration each time it is heard. Such schemes can be devised by taking a pre-determined block of time and dividing it in a manner to suit whichever compositional aims are seeking to be met.
My design is slightly shorter in total duration than Meshuggah’s (meaning I can therefore claim originality), but uses the ideas of the expanding answering phrase and the alternating groups of two and three semiquavers. The upper design can be observed clearly by studying the time signatures changes in my score:
I'm on to something, and all it took was a little help from Philip Glass and Meshuggah.
The left-hand column of my design always take the form of 12/16 bars (four groups of three) while the intersticed bars acquire an additional quaver of duration at each iteration. This scheme is largely adhered to, with some necessary obfuscation*, apart from a transitionary section that employs the abridged scheme outlined at the bottom of my design (section D of the score).
The design alone is not, I felt, of sufficient complexity to sustain an entire piece. I furthered the metric muddiness by beginning with the left-hand part keeping a pulse in 4/4, creating a kind of metric dissonance that serves as a well from which I can draw rhythmic material throughout the remainder of the piece. I introduce accents that emphasise downbeats of the rhythmic scheme starting in section B and reach maximum density of texture in section F as these accents are combined fully with the implied 4/4 metre.
Harmonically, I adhered to a very loose scheme of reaching successively higher in pitch by the conclusion of each section, though the exertions I undertook in exploring the possibilities of the rhythmic design mean that I resorted to composing pitch material largely intuitively. Still, I think there is a general trajectory from low to high that is divinable by comparing the mid-register with which the piece starts to the final bars in which the right hand reaches to the very top of the keyboard.
In Phase 2, I will focus on building a more robust harmonic structure. I feel there is scope to develop a kind of harmonic analogue to the rhythmic structure I have built here, in which ‘pivot’ points allow me to trace an upward trajectory through the use of modulations.
*A brief note for the extremely attentive: in section E in particular, you may well have noted that the right and left hands do not appear to be aligned harmonically. This was the result of serendipity—during development, I bounced a recording from Logic to give me an idea of how it was sounding and somehow the left-hand part shifted itself by a duration of one quaver. It sounded pretty good, so in my newly laissez-faire compositional approach I rolled with it and made it a part of the score.
Bonus: Retribution I
I wrote this a young student and it actually contains plagiarism (and not from the most respectable source at that). If it does make its way into this set of works it will require review, but in my inexperience I chose to write a long arpeggio section in the most difficult key to play arpeggios in, so I may well decide that I'm not able to find the necessary effort. Here is a practice recording anyway.
Bonus: Whatever this is
Whatever this turns into will likely be the final track of the album. Maybe it'll also be my encore piece.
It started as me trying to imitate Mississippi John Hurt's very unique guitar style on piano (that little 1,2,3&4 rhythmic motif is key). Main sections of the piece are there in this improv, just needs some condensing, perhaps a 'solo' section, and an ending (the latter is fairly important).
