For most of this week I've been working on some piano music, initially for a performance at Chester Cathedral on September 23rd 2016. My first public performance of any sort was in July 2015, at an art preview. Myself with artist Sabine Kussmaul had been asked to do "something" at the opening of an exhibition then, and I asked an artist friend, the enigmatic "Escargot" to help too. I largely improvised music to accompany Snail's automatic stories for that; no pressure, as the result was destined to be "avant-garde" and should merely be expressive, which is simple. Falling over can be expressive, and for an artist always is. An artist doing anything is art. Honest expression is the root of art and the duty of the artist, so to act this way is simple.
Here is a photo from that event a year ago...
The music then evolved, and that performance, named The Anatomy of Emotions, became a series of six piano tunes of about 4 minutes. These tunes grew independently. The last one was a simple single chord melody. The second tune was an improvisation around A minor and E minor, those two tunes were present at that first performance. The others were written for the second performance, and were very simple melodies and arpeggios, each amounting to about two minutes which then repeated with a bit of variation. Earlier this year I released the set as an album, lengthened a few tracks and added a few more in a similar style, some live improvisations.
Now I'm tasked with new music with a similar layout, again to accompany videos by Sabine.
This time I had to write everything from a starting point, and I wanted to create something unified, like a six movement sonata. My self-taught piano playing is far from performance standard, yet I knew that I could improve by inserting a few parts that would train me by virtue of having to play them, but I still felt very lacking in the performance skills that I needed to truly compose the music I'd like. Thus, I must create something with a rough outline but an artistic heart.
The six parts represent different ideas related to architecture; Organic Flow, Old Versus New, Perpetual Change, Death/Collapse, The Night/Healing, Rebirth Connections.
I began with a simple cycling tune that reminded me of perpetual change because it created in my mind the image of a perpetual motion machine. This melody was in D minor and made up of a group of four notes with the emphasis on the last note. I thought of expanding this idea, and made an outline of the "death/collapse" tune use the same melody. For the rest though, something new was needed, so I inverted the melody a bit, making it climb up in D minor, using slightly different notes. Then I created a positive version of the same melody in C major, a happy version. This eventually became the main melody in the final part.
In drama or music, one trick is to create a cresendo, or single moment that summarises the whole, then build towards it. In a limerick it's best to write the first line, then the last, and so in music too, creating the start and then the ending, then make everything pull towards the ending. This is the key. The end is always a destination that should be longed for. Alfred Hitchcock said that he wishes he'd not had the climax in his films, to keep his famously tense audience, tense. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony essentially begins with the famous Ode to Joy, yet the music doesn't start with it, instead lighting a touch paper that drops hints towards it all over the place, such that the audience expects it, unconsciously.
I fear that my conclusion is a little more overt! The seeds of my first piece "Organic Flow" are sad and searching. Old Versus New will be largely improvised on this theme, thus bridging the gaps between it and the slightly different (yet related) perpetual change, the only part in 3/4 time.
I'm still working on a lot of this, and learning apace to read music. A thousand curses that I didn't do this earlier, but we can't change the past. I'd not played a piano at all until 2008 at a friend's house, and only started playing "seriously" last autumn, just as I only started painting "seriously" in January 2007. Memorising the 30 minutes of new music requires a few mental tricks, hindered a little by a performance of The Anatomy of Emotions the week before the premiere of this music, but we can't fail, if we are expressive.
Meanwhile here is a poster for the accompanying art exhibition, which I'll also be submitting some sculptural work to.
