So now my piece is finished, and I’ve rather neglected this blog, but I promised I’d write more, so here it is.
It’s the first time in quite a while (nearly five years) that I’ve written a piece and been happy with the result; previously I’ve finished a piece and thought, “well, its ok I suppose, but I wish I had another week to change that bit”. There has been some of that this time round, but much less than normal. I’m my own harshest critic, so its inevitable really.
The workshops have been really great, and haven’t thrown up as many problems as I’d expected. I’ve kept the extended techniques that often characterise my music to a minimum, which may have made life a lot easier, but there are so many notes in this piece that to add lots of extended techniques as well would have been too much. That said, this piece is concerned with a kind of ‘information overload’, as I mentioned in my last post, but that comes from the density of information presented all at once, rather than the type of information. In other words, at the opening, there are many gestures and harmonic ideas superimposed, in such a way that each one is almost unidentifiable.
Throughout the opening, more jagged gestures begin to come to the fore, and move around a limited harmonic framework, before blurring into a moment of aural cleansing. In other pieces, I would consider this a ‘moment of clarity’, where the harmonic ideas behind the piece are presented in their simplest form, usually a chorale. To an extent, this is also the case with this piece, but the chorale is blurred into the the glissandi gestures.
Thats all I want to say about the piece itself, as I said before, I’m not keen on blow by blow accounts of pieces, its never a good as just listening to it!
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