Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of York : A - Music
Pianthology : 7 piano pieces
This submission consists of two related items:
1) The 2008 UYMP edition of seven contemporary piano pieces, _Pianthology_. This edition contained a link to streamed recordings of the pieces.
2) The 2011 NMC commercial recording, _Pianthology_, distributed via download: http://www.nmcrec.co.uk/recording/pianthology.
The research content of this submission lay in the creation of expressive strategies for the previously unrecorded pieces. Four (Gilbert, Lumsdaine, Harrison and Hughes) did not require complex expressive strategies because their expressive worlds were grounded in familiar gestures and topics; these composers also wrote extensive notes which encouraged particular expressive approaches. I wrote notes for the three remaining pieces explaining my own expressive strategy. A summary follows here; please refer to the edition for the full notes.
Kondo deemed his piece ‘purely abstract music’, suggesting the performer should emphasize form and process. But he also said that the piece should have ‘a touch of dance flavour’. The connection between music and dance is one of the oldest, functional relationships, and this became the primary means to expressive strategy: positive energy, negative energy, or stasis.
The poem which inspired Parades’s _Caligrama_ led me to understand the silences in the outer sections as those of yearning, not inertia. The poem’s desperation connects with the constant use of diminished and augmented chords, which deny resolution through their reference to tonal music. Even at the end of the piece, psychological closure is denied.
Simaku’s _des pas chromatiques_ has a strong series of aural ‘images’ which attain narrative logic through repetition in varied forms. The two compositional ideas are those stemming from the Debussy motive (the piece’s inspiration), and the chromatic flourishes. Analysis of the Debussy motive was the primary clue as to the relationship between melodic lines and the ways in which the sections relate to each other.
