New Album: The Archidoxes, Book 2
This one happened fast. I've been intending to do a second "book" of solo piano music soon but it came together with the theoretical things in my last two blog posts and the next thing I knew I had an album of music.
As usual, listen here or on Bandcamp for free now, pay what you like to download it and it'll appear on all the streaming services and whatnot over the next week or two. Some ruminations about the music below the fold.
The twelve pieces each use one of the fifths-ful heptatonics as the basis of a shimmer tuning using various offset intervals from 20 cents (pretty subtle) all the way up to 40 (very much not subtle). The piano is Pianoteq (as always) running in Reaper with no effects except it's built-in room and microphone simulations.
The pieces were recorded as one-take improvisations and then tidied up afterwards -- mostly a matter of cutting bits to tighten up the composition and repairing sections where my fingers didn't do what I wanted. I keep the latter to a minimum despite my self-conciousness because I want to keep the live and played-by-a-human quality that you lose if you start quantizing and so on.
The connection between the shimmer tuning idea and the tunings (and sounds) of Balinese gamelans led to a few ideas that come up repeatedly in the pieces. One is the use of quite declarative, simple melodies harmonized in more-or-less parallel stacks of dissonant intervals. Another is the use of pairs of notes that differ by the "shimmer" interval to create very glittery effects.
But this expanded into an interest in the piano's capacity for such effects. I use a lot of sympathetic resonance, both with the sostenuto pedal and with silently-depressed notes ("Sadedali" makes extensive use of these, for example). I used the damper to create sudden contrasts between these sounds and actual "silence", i.e. the reverb tail the resonance leaves behind.
A lot more thought went into the piano's nature as wooden-box-of-wires than in the Book 1 -- an especially interesting exploration since my piano isn't a wooden box of wires at all. certainly there's a callback here to my interest in the spectralists, who lurk in the background of a lot of my music.
Overall I tried to balance the rather way-out tunings and scales with simple melodic gestures that shoot through my usual clouds of dissonance. For that specific balance I was (as I always am) under the influence of Ives's Concord Sonata, which remains without any qualification one of my favourite pieces of music. I'm particularly influenced here by the way snatches of folk-like songs, hymns and dances weave in and out of harmony that can turn extremely dissonant without any warning.
It's dissonance as punctuation, emphasis -- "expression", even. My last few releases have been very abrasive even for me so this music surprised me by being rather tender and, I hope, approachable. In a few places -- especially when I was messing with the structure of the piano -- I felt a tug back to a time when I listened to a lot of Henry Cowell, who also combined such things with folkish melodies. I've made a date with Cowell for a deeper conversation another time.
I can also hear an even more distant connection some of Alan Hovhaness's gentle, gamelan-inspired piano music, which I ought to know better than I do.
The track titles are the names of the hours given in the medieval manuscript called Heptameron, traditionally attributed to Pietro d'Abano. There's no real significance to this except (a) there are twelve of them and (b) it's coherent with the theme of the Archidoxes series. I have more ideas for this project in future beyond just doing more "books" (which I certainly plan on). But they'll need time to germinate.
