Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Surrey
Piano Concerto (for piano and orchestra, 30 minutes)
Background
Commissioned by SW Mitchell Capital
First performance 25th April, 2013, Cadogan Hall, London
Emmanuel Despax and the Orpheus Sinfonia
Recording released by Signum Classics on 25th November 2013
Justification
This output ties together a number of threads in my current research: collaboration, music and landscape, notions of virtuosity, and stylistic pluralism.
Music and Landscape
The piano concerto is a collaboration with the architect/artist/designer Thomas Heatherwick (designer of the Olympic Cauldron) and it marks the culmination of my recent work on music and landscape. Four of Heatherwick’s stylistically diverse projects are used as source material, one for each movement. My research questions are centred on ways in which I can represent Heatherwick’s designs in a musically appropriate way, reflecting the contrasting styles and construction methods of each work.
I explore innovative ways of balancing literal and metaphorical representations of these objects in music. For example, in Bleigiessen, I map the whole sculpture in three-dimensional space and apply musical parameters to its various axes (pitch, time, density, instrumentation, colour, and harmony). This raw material is then intuitively polished to produce the final musical object. In B of the Bang each segment of the sculpture is given its own material and the chaotic geometric patterns of the spikes are used to generate the form and harmonic template for the piece.
Idiomatic virtuosity
The solo piano part was written in close collaboration with Emmanuel Despax, building on our 2010 project Portraits and Landscapes (and referring back to several other solo piano projects with various pianists). In the concerto, our collaborative piano writing attempts to reinvent the intuitive and idiomatic virtuosity of the 19th Century concerto. This methodology utilizes the adaptive unconscious in the compositional process, what psychologist Timothy Wilson (2002) has termed the locked door of intuitive decision making.
