6 posts tagged “solo piano”
In this post, I'll be making the Vox premiere of the second and third movements of my three-part (book of) Job inspired piece, "רחין", that title being the initials of the first of the three lines of text that inspired the piece and its movements:
(אֶל־אֱלוֺהַ דָּלפָה עֵינִי)
קְבָרִם לִי
Feverish and frustrated last night, coming from the flu into bronchitis on top of myriad other issues and irritations from things going wrong or badly with friends and family, I turned, as I sometimes do, to a bit of "key banging" as an outlet for said frustration.
For any curious, I ended up recording the result, which is here, Mens turbulenta. (Now, with a preliminary recording of a string quintet arrangement of the score.)
Yesterday, the 25th, was the birthday of a close friend who passed away a few years ago, and they were much on my mind; the combination of such thoughts with randomly running across the eponymous Bacovia poem produced this small piano work. For the curious, the original Romanian poem is:
Afară ninge prăpădind,
Iubita cântă la clavir,—
Si târgul stă întunecat,
De parcă ninge-n cimitir.Iubita cântă-un mars funebru,
iar eu nedumerit mă mir:
De ce să cânte-un mars funebru…
Si ninge ca-ntr-un cimitir.Ea plânge si-a cazut pe clape,
Si geme greu ca în delir…
În dezacord clavirul moare,
Si ninge ca-ntr-un cimitir.Si plâng si eu si tremurând
Pe umeri pletele-i răsfir…
Afară târgul stă pustiu,
Si ninge ca-ntr-un cimitir.
A rough, off-the-cuff translation, might be rendered
Neurosis
Outside, it's snowing horribly;
my lover's playing the piano—
and the town looks as gloomy
as snow in a cemetery.My lover's playing a funeral march,
and I puzzle myself wondering
why she chooses to play that…
like snow in a cemetery.She weeps and she falls on the keys,
and she whimpers painfully as in a fever…
in discord the piano dies,
like snow in a cemetery.And I lament, and, trembling,
I spread out her hair over her shoulders…
outside the town is deserted,
like snow in a cemetery.
And I guess this whole post is a bit "întunecat, De parcă ninge-n cimitir." Though perhaps the music will atone for the mood. Enjoy—if that's the proper word for the subject matter.
As ever, comments on the material are welcome.
Nothing especially clever tonight, alas, just an idle bit of time wasting. You could think of this as what happens when you mix together varying amounts of sleep deprivation, recovering-from-illness, Erik Satie, Chopin and myself---or, "Raindropédienne", perhaps, for short (a combination of Chopin's 15th prelude, the "Raindrop" prelude, with Satie's first Gymnopédie and Gnossienne). It's a small piano work with an ABA structure; in A---a liberal treatment of Am---the left hand is a simple motion similar to the bass of the Gnossienne, while the melody is almost a verbatim transposition of the opening melody of the prelude. In B, we briefly modulate to Cm, and a tiny microcosmic ABA form of its own, where in Ba the bass is a slight variant on the initial bass of the C#m modulation in the prelude, while the right hand takes on a transposed variation on the Gnossienne melody; in Bb, the bass continues to follow the prelude but becomes a transposition of the material from the left hand of the molto tenuto movement of that work, and the melody becomes a Lydian transposition of the right hand theme of the Gymnopedie.
Other than doing the transpositions, stitching the disparate parts together and touching up a note here or there where the original themes didn't quite mesh, there's so little of myself in this piece I hardly feel right putting my name on it. As a result, I won't be adding this piece to my formal catalogue of works, naturally, but it was a fairly pleasant exercise and not quite the hand-mangler Für Elise on the bass proved to be, so I thought I'd tip up a copy here for any who might be interested.
A new piano score, Luctus; C# minor with a brief modulation in G#m. Play time of around 7'38". Comments welcome, as ever.
A piece for solo piano, just over three minutes' playtime, recorded today, written during a recent bout of illness. It's named for Pessoa's book, The Education of the Stoic, about which I've been thinking a lot lately, and takes cues from it, but is written in a somewhat Satiesque style.
