The two series of keyboard music from the late nineties were written with great rapidity at points two years apart where, on each occasion, I had just left a job and been able to launch back into composing for a week or two.
The first series was composed on paper at the piano, while the second was improvised into 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 (=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 period I worked variously as a teacher of English, fire brigade chef, translator, pamphlet writer and seller, call-centre clerk and technical author. Composing time was precious, private, sacred and both liberating and an existential nightmare: it was an activity purely for itself, in complete isolation.
When I sat 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-arrange 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 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 '91motifs '92 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 '96 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 '96 human and automated '96 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 all but paid two of the musicians '92 appearance fees). After the concert he said, chuckling; '93By the time it was finished, I '92d learnt to read music! '94. 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?
After a number of works had been played (I forget the first part of the programme), a Fazioli MIDI-enabled grand 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 (so that the loop length was long enough for the computer '92s 486 processor not to freeze on a single note, repeating it frenetically until system shut-down) and paced around the house basement of the house I shared, individual parts blaring for an hour at a time as I lived with them 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.
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 so hypnotically that their flaws seemed to highlight themselves. Further silent edits then listening, sometimes a period with the score so far away from the computer, reading to hear it internally then returning to try to carve the hoped for results directly as sound.
inspired by having attended a Ligeti Etudes recital at the Royal Academy a couple of years earlier
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