i am very pleased to present my first large scale compostion as number eight in the nexTTime production series.
There was an old piano in a corner of the studio, and one day I just had this drive to dig it open, and start putting things in the strings. I was into Cage, obviously, but never saw any of his instructions, or knew how to go about it. I don’t really play piano, but I have years of experience as an improviser on prepared guitar, and so I had an army or crocodile clips at hand and a few other tricks. At first, I wanted to create a database of samples to place into compositions or performing live. This project turned out to be rather different.
I spent a day in the studio working at the piano and preparing all the strings, playing by ear, and aiming for a whole range of sounds, textures, percussive tones.
The second day, I started recording individual notes for sampling, but very quickly I found myself improvising on this new instrument I had created. I came up with motifs, runs, hits and whole sections that were just playing and enjoying the sounds, coming up with rhythmical patterns and so on.
By the end of the day, I had plenty of material to take home.
The next stage was spent doing was I do best, editing, processing, sculpting, and creating yet another database of new samples where the piano had turned electro. Here again, I created textures, harmonic samples, rhythmical patterns and individual hits. And so, the track called ‘empty piano’ came first.
But I did not stop there; while playing with the recordings, I started arranging sections of piano, and just with skeletons of tracks, I knew I had something quite special. For me it was a unique opportunity to use what was an unusual instrumentation and a change from electric guitar and electroacoustic pieces.
Working on the set of short films as sound recordist, I met Carrie who is a trained classical singer as well as actress. I managed to record a few short samples off set, but later approached her asking if she would record in a studio for me. And so I prepared sets of instructions for her so I could harvest more samples, short motifs and single notes in a range of styles to later rework in computer, and integrate all this into the compositions I had.
And this is pretty much the making of this work. Add to this some field recordings, and electronics, programmed beats and sines…
It is an unusual approach to the format of the symphony; in four movements and with four classes of instruments.
Looking back, I still rather like the sweetness of this piece, and it still feels fresh. Somehow, the themes that play out through the movements of nature versus urbanisation, also illustrated in the contrasting sounds that make the line up, are still relevant to me.
A symphony for prepared piano, voice, field recordings and electronics, in four movements.
the concept:
The prepared piano symphony follows the traditional arch narrative of the form. In parallel of the evolution of music, the sounds follow a historical trajectory of technology in relation to mankind and nature.
In the first movement, the four classes of instruments – prepared piano, voice, field recordings, electronics – set the scene. The piano echoes the state of technology and design of the time. It is metaphorically the birth of the industrial revolution and the machine.
In the second movement, there is a shift in sound quality and atmosphere as modernism hits a stride, and the technology becomes altered in need of the new, of progress. The instrument / technology is ‘prepared’ in ways that reflect more modern soundscapes with the appearance of pulses and drones in contrast to the more mechanical and dramatic opening section. The second movement is already bridging the modern sound of the ‘prepared piano’ into the digital age, a further alteration of the industrial age and its resulting soundscapes:
As we follow the evolution in struggle between man, machine and nature, into a post materialist rebirth, past the explosion of the atom and the advance in granular synthesis, into a quantum world of digital jungle, we also follow a different narrative of how the piano (here representative of a certain technological advancement) is gradually prepared and transformed further still as we delve deeper into its resonance and sonic architecture at the digital atomic level.
There is a parallel between the history of the industrial landscape and the evolution of musical instruments and their uses to reflect social changes. We delve deeper into the texture and atomic resonance of matter, of the physical world, of the musical object in ways that deconstructs its original technological advancement.
By the third movement, it is the age of doubt and there is a looming, brooding turmoil in the balance of the world and it reaches a climax with uncertainty and existentialism. It is the end of history, the loss of meaning, and even of the purpose of materialism and the quantum field of emptiness where grains of reality and pulverised to conditioned compounded vibrations.
This is only resolved in the fourth movement when after a dramatic discharge of energy in the form of a lightening storm when life is stilled into suspension, electronic entities, prepared piano, voice and nature all navigate around a more coherent system of interactions which has its own rhythms, cycles and its own logic.
nexttime studio 