3 posts tagged with "piano"

Rather cool to be sharing the bill with 'Six Pianos' tomorrow night. Call me a boring old minimalist, but I still love that piece.

Here's the lineup:

Multiple Piano Extravaganza 7.30pm Stevenson Hall, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland £9.50/£6.50

Steve Reich Six pianos Jonathan Plowright, Alina Horvath, Maraike Breuning, Monika Palsauskaite, Catherine Clark, Donal McHugh

Vera Stanojevic Droplets of Dew for 4 pianos and electronics (World Premiere) Sinae Lee, Graeme McNaught, Fali Pavri and Aaron Shorr

Free improvisations for multiple pianos, electronics and voice Anto Pett, Anne Liis Poll, Alistair MacDonald and Aaron Shorr

J Simon van der Walt RITE for Four Pianos and Electronics (World Premiere) Sinae Lee, Fionnuala Ward, Beth Jerem, Marlon Bordas Gonzalez

I'm working on about three new pieces at the moment. The second of these is a collaboration with pianist Silviya Mihaylova on a shortish work for piano and laptop. The piano part is kind of done: Silviya took my sketches and added some ideas of her own. Apart from that, I have a program note, and some programming:

The title of this piece is taken from Stanisław Lem’s 1971 science fiction comedy classic ‘The Star Diaries’. In ‘The Seventh Voyage’ the hero of the stories, hapless cosmonaut Ijon Tichy, finds his rocket trapped in a loop of time. His attempts to repair the ship’s rudder are continually frustrated by the appearance of younger and older copies of himself:

“Just a minute,” I replied, remaining on the floor. “Today is Tuesday. Now if you are the Wednesday me, and if by that time on Wednesday the rudder still hasn’t been fixed, then it follows that something will prevent us from fixing it, since otherwise you, on Wednesday, would not now, on Tuesday, be asking me to help you fix it. Wouldn’t it be best, then, for us not to risk going outside?”

“Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “Look, I’m the Wednesday me and you’re the Tuesday me, and as for the rocket, well, my guess is that its existence is patched, which means that in places it’s Tuesday, in places Wednesday, and here and there perhaps there’s even a bit of Thursday. Time has simply become shuffled up in passing through these vortices, but why should that concern us, when together we are two and therefore have a chance to fix the rudder?!”

from Stanisław Lem ‘The Star Diaries’ – Chapter 1 ‘The Seventh Voyage’

Lots under the hood, but here's the front page of the pd patch so far:

The programme note for my latest piece Étude-Poème pour Pianiste Récitant, being performed this evening at 1830 by Silviya Mihaylova.

'So, here’s the idea; a piano étude where the pianist speaks to the audience, playing along with what she is saying. This idea has several things going for it, for one, hopefully nobody else will have hit on the selfsame thing. Also… here’s what it says in the Oxford Companion to Music, under ‘étude’;

‘The essence of the genre is revealed in the title of one of J. B. Cramer’s sets, “Dulce et utile” (“sweet and useful”), as distinct from an ‘exercise’ which is merely useful.’

And that seems to me to be right, an étude should be entertaining as well as a technical challenge. Big drawback, of course, is that far from being original it’s really far too much like that Tom Johnson piece ‘Failing: A Very Difficult Piece For String Bass’. Oh well. Too bad.