Output details

After and Before

First performed by Roderick Chadwick and Ensemble Plus-Minus, conducted by Mark Knoop, Kings Place, London, 15 October 2012. Recorded on The Music of Making Strange (Carrier, 2013).

The stimulus for this piece was a question I was asked by pianist Roderick Chadwick: ‘has there ever been a truly spectral piano piece?’ Without committing to a definition of ‘true spectralism’, this became a starting point for investigation. How does the piano function in a spectrally-derived, microtonal, musical environment? How can the resonance of the instrument be used as musical material?

While there are models in works such as Murail’s Territoires de l’Oubli and Lachenmann’s Serynade, the investigation of historical precedent was also a crucial part of the project, and two moments are especially important. One is the beginning of Liszt’s Funerailles, which is briefly quoted, but more importantly cited obliquely through the work’s dual C and C# fundamentals, and through the presence of a mid-register harmony that is overtone-related to both fundamentals. The other is the opening of Chopin’s Op. 27 No. 1 nocturne, where an overtone-spaced bass without a third creates a strongly audible just major third, which in turn makes the first melodic minor 3rd a dissonance while simultaneously belonging to the tonic. This ambiguity is addressed in the tension between the piano’s own resonance and intonational variants of it in the ensemble.

The process also engaged with the technology of the piano. The electronic parts are generated through the spectral analysis of recordings of the fundamentals made on the many historical instruments in the Academy’s collection, each of which has different overtone characteristics. The final recording of the work also takes a novel approach to the piano’s resonance, using close microphone placement and the manipulation of recording levels to lift the resonances in a way that might normally be considered excessive or unnatural.