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The Dead Broke Blues Break, Piano Trio No.2 (2012)

The Dead Broke Blues Break, Piano Trio No.2 (2012)

For the Lawson Trio. Published by Edition Peters, ii+40. Duration: 15 minutes. Premiere: Lawson Trio, South Bank Centre, London, with live broadcast on BBC Radio 3, April 2012. CD release on Prima Facie (PCF012).

This explores musical entropy – going ‘against the grain’ through a structure that diffuses in energy – and the relationship between musical time and clock time. One of the really interesting things about music is its ability to manipulate the way we perceive the passing of time, and to achieve very different rates of listening. Carter explored this in his Cello Sonata (and other works), which pits the mechanical against the lyrical. The Second Taverner Fantasia by Peter Maxwell Davies is also a good example of something that explores a sudden change of pacing in its final section. But the main influence was the Led Zeppelin track Heartbreaker, which has very unusual proportions. It contains a guitar break that, in the group's live versions, is much longer than the rest of the music in terms of clock time. But it feels much shorter: as if our experience of time is suspended. My trio contains a pizzicato (mock bass) cello solo that is very long in terms of clock time; but in terms of musical time feels much shorter. This is achieved by a pronounced change in pacing to the music that precedes it. The first part is tightly woven and highly pulsed. The cello break is approached by a series of accelerating pulse ladders (i.e. 2:3 ladder culminating at M; 3:4 ladder culminating at O). After this build up of tension, the cello solo is suddenly much more relaxed in its rhetoric and phrase structure. The rate of perception changes from very tightly focused to more diffuse.