Music for Keyboard:1997, 1999
&
Suite for Four Hands 1996

The two “Music for Keyboard” series were written at great speed almost two years apart when, on each occasion, I had just left a job and been able to launch back into composing for a week or two. The first was composed on paper at the piano, while the second was improvised at a digital piano connected to a computer, then edited onscreen. Composing this music was an act of celebration, in times memorable for the bursts of manic, random joy by which they were characterised.

These compositions were written with the kinds of intuitive, semi-conscious reference to musical influences and to past technical study that a performing improviser might make. Several of these short pieces have a clear simple structure (either a 'mirrored' second half with slight variation or connected blocks), a couple are considerably more fluid or complex in structure although in no case was the structure pre-determined: it emerged as inevitable as the character of the lines, rhythmic elements and tonalities became clearer during composition.

The music arose from my subconscious and was composed at speed. Several years of less satisfactory results (written both slowly, with formal planning and rapidly, without) preceded their production.

Nearly two years had passed between composing MK97 and MK99, during which time I worked as a teacher of English, a fire brigade chef, translator, pamphlet writer and seller, call-centre clerk, cemeteries inspector and technical author.

Composing time was precious, private, sacred, liberating and an existential nightmare: it was an activity purely for itself, in complete isolation.

Sitting down to write the '99 set, in late April of that year, still breathing heavily with relief after the end of a suffocating contract in an aeronautical company, I was manic with exuberant joy, like a greyhound off the blocks or a celibate sumo entering the ring.

A part of the satisfaction though, of composing and as hoped in listening, was the restraint of mania into tightly coiled structures that unfurl and are re-arranged with efficient precision.

It is important to my musical explorations to seek simultaneous expression of multiple conflicted or disparate influences whose only apparent commonality was in their appeal on one level or another.

The 'system' then was intuitively developed, by which these compositional essays grew with reference to transformed, incomplete memory of played, imagined and heard works.

A continuous fascination with Baroque composers' thematic development (particularly J.S.Bach‘s Fugues) combines here with a study of how digital software can be used in new ways to investigate the insides of musical shapes and their exposition in previously impossible fashions.

In terms of music composition software, there is a great deal to say about their imposition of boundaries, even regulations, on the composer, the immediacy of certain functions and transformations, the unwieldy efforts necessary to achieve other ends such as gradual, subtle rhythmic or timbral transformations. That is the subject for other articles.

It can be argued that each combination of composer, moment in time, working environment and software platform is so complex a set of parameters that they could yield only one possible musical result or, that the variety of outputs from such rich variables may be potentially infinite.

I tend toward the former view. I believe it is necessary for the solitary composer to attain an almost out-of-body objectivity if the music emerging from a digital studio is not rapidly to descend below the formulaic, becoming a parody of the working conditions at the centre of which sits the disingenuously impassive digital interface.

The composer is required therefore, in the face of these still new (and constantly changing, offering, mediating) tools to consider, before starting to work, how the tool will be made to serve a musical purpose rather than being generative of it.

The pieces shown here pursued the intent of a dual development of small musical cells, usually ‘motifs’ or horizontal fragments.

Firstly, this concerned a repeated, echoed, mirrored exposition of the first fragment, which appears to have the simplicity of a basic un-combined geometric shape and secondly, towards an evocation of the half-recovered memory that constitutes all creative endeavour: dialogue with both the consciously and unconsciously absorbed, memory of both imagined and heard music, of the canon and of obscure or fleeting sounds like a stranger playing in a far-off room.

This is though, whilst piano or pianistic music in some senses, not composed for a performer. It was conceived in isolation as finished music, removed from the interaction between performer and listener '96 without the mediating presence of a performer.

There are two reasons for this. The first was purely practical: an attempt at circumventing the growing difficulties of achieving a precisely required sonic character, of staging and raising audiences for live performance in 'traditional' settings. Many of these difficulties arose due to the unfamiliarity of the music to performers habituated to the narrowly-acknowledged canon, ending or tapering off with music composed around the beginning of the twentieth century. The second is that as I developed this working style, it became clear that things could be achieved in the digital studio that were unattainable otherwise, in terms of dynamic range and what Nancarrow referred to as 'temporal dissonance' - I was not to discover his work, via of course the 'Player-Piano Studies', until 2003.

The technology can now be made to serve the creation of inhuman, superhuman, extrahuman music that scores of innovators, dreamers and futurists could only dream of. A greater complexity and variation of sonic texture is now possible than could have been achieved with any early IRCAM budget, let alone by the impecunious lone worker.

When I first wheeled a PC and digital piano onto a stage, at the Canal Café Theatre, it was a pleasure to witness the shocked fascination, impossible now to reproduce, amongst the audience who had just listened to music for flute, cello and piano trio.

This was the first performance of the Music for Keyboard 1997, where harpsichordist Penelope Cave efficiently and elegantly delivered the first three pieces. In terms of what can be achieved by a human performer and at an instrument whose greatest shortcoming is in the lack of dynamic range, unless simulated by manual sustain and temporal fluctuations, it was a success.

It was also necessary to demonstrate to the audience the contrast between the two means - human and automated - of musical delivery. The fourth piece was played by the sampled harpsichord of a Yamaha pf-85 digital piano, controlled by Cakewalk v.2 on a Pentium 2 p.c. The biggest worry was not audience dismay (to which composers get relatively habituated) but that the Windows operating system would automatically start a complex system check during the performance and crash the machine.

A moustachioed old psychiatrist and his wife sat at the front, drinking champagne (I sold a very small number of valuable VIP tickets that helped pay the musicians' appearance fees). Afterwards he laughed “By the time it was finished, I’d learnt to read music!”. The novelty was appealing, although the notion of an automated performer was so foreign to many that amongst comment later heard, the computer-driven performances were barely mentioned.

One audience member, a jeweller from Goodge St, wrote a two page letter of rage about the self-indulgence of a composer inflicting sustained abject misery upon his audience: he had interpreted the unsettled tonality of the Cello Sonata in a light which was surprising and salutary. It seems that the semiotics of tonal relations continue to function for most contemporary listeners in much the way as they did upon those at the beginning of the last century. Despite the use of non-tonal music from the outset in cinema, it continues to be perceived as an expression of dysfunction, disjunction, an otherness to be feared.

It was though certainly the case with these four short pieces of 1997, as demonstrated by Penny Cave, that an accomplished performer could execute them well, with forceful brio. Why was it necessary to wheel out a machine, other than to grab attention?

It almost certainly stems from being invited to a concert at the Royal Academy in which the most memorable part was the Piano Etudes of Ligeti, performed by computer rigged up to a Fazioli MIDI-enabled grand piano.

During the second half of the concert, the piano was wheeled onto the right side of the stage and connected with slow deliberation to a bulky trolley of equipment topped by a CRT monitor the size of a small fridge. Two engineers worked under the piano, connecting cables and calibrating the computer while we watched their every movement in breath-held fascination, attempted to anticipate what might follow. Placing a stool carefully in front of the keyboard, they grinned cheekily and exeunt.

For perhaps fifteen minutes I did not move my head or swallow: the keys of this apparently normal concert grand piano now fluttered now smashed, cascading eruptions and microcosmic swarms hovering over the instrument suddenly dispersing and regrouping like flocks of swallows, crystalline geometric fractals infinitely expanding beyond the threshold of auditory perception.

It was probably this inspiration above all that led to the composition of the Suite for Four Hands.

For the first time, instead of ‘through-composing’ in detailed attention to the vertical arrangement of the music as it proceeded slowly forwards, I would set up single lines built of small structures that repeated and expanded, paste them to multiple seamless consecutive copies.

This was partly so that the loop length was long enough for the computer’s 486 processor not to freeze on a single note, repeating it frenetically until system shut-down. It also permitted pacing around the basement studio area of the house I shared, with individual parts blaring for an hour or more at a time, until their apparently inevitable counterparts presented themselves to mind and I returned to the room, switched off the player and wrote them in, in silence.

My working method was tolerated by my housemate Lizzie with good humour but less so by her increasingly present, sulky brother or the petulant landlord Finn, who would arrive unannounced to make random statements of intended building work, maintenance requirements and eviction threats.

After each such period, sometimes two hours of silent note-setting (almost exactly like working on music paper) I would leave the machine and de-boggle my eyes, drink coffee, walk, stretch, return and listen, looping again to hear moments or stretches repeated hypnotically so flaws, disjunctures, sharp edges emerged and would be replaced with tentative solutions, sometimes in parallel layers, muting one additional part to listen to another then swapping, like trying to remember strings of words read from a speeding train, trying to catch and re-catch the sense of the passing phrases as if hearing them for the first time.

Then more silent edits then more listening, sometimes a period with just the score away from the computer, reading to hear it internally then returning to try to carve the hoped for results directly in sound.

Technology continues to present ever more possibility and the composer attempts to immerse their thought in these changes, this shifting potential as a pre-condition to producing new work such that the inhuman may be given breath and the semblance of sentience.

Thus the notion of technology‘s facilitating the production of music - or indeed anything else - more quickly than previously is a misleading one. In the first place, the composer has now become type-setter, part copyist, editor, printer, distributor and promoter, thanks to the labour-saving innovations of the information revolution.

The working process though now contains a thousand distractions that writing with a full pen on dry flat paper would never present.

It is tempting to organise views of the document: quantising the notated view to a certain resolution will give it increased legibility although it is now misleadingly simple in depiction of constantly shifting rhythmic relations and tempi.

Again, in a complex score the search for the greatest achievable clarity is a constant priority. In Logic software it is possible to apply a general or selective function throughout the notated score to &lsquo'Force Syncopation’. This displays note lengths in their simplest format ignoring the logical division of a bar into beats or groups of beats (4/4 as two pairs of beats or 6/8 as two groups of three half-beats).

Notes are now shown as whole units rather than tied multiple smaller ones. The reader may thus in some cases more clearly understand the movement of patterns and their changes against each other. It is not a single simple solution to the struggle for clarity and is frequently considerably less clear.

You might save the document under 2 new file names, one with syncopation forced and the other reverting to ‘syncopation/defeat’ - in other words, with notes grouped by whole beats or beat groups rather than across rhythmic dividing lines suggesting by a given time signature.

Neither solutions will be wholly satisfactory, so one begins to compare the two states at each instance of ambiguity. To make all of the necessary editorial decisions for consistency and clarity on this single issue may take several hours in a three minute piano piece. There are numerous matters of this type requiring such consideration, any of which must be re-worked throughout the whole piece if they have preceded further musical changes.

Scores will follow here when time permits...