Re: Composers who use lots of silence
Louis Goldstein <louieg <at> wfu.edu>
2009-02-03 02:29:13 GMT
Yehuda Yannay's "Continuum" from 1969 has long passages of slow, soft
material which dies away into silence.
But in addition to this, for much of the piece the pianist is instructed
to pantomime playing the notes. This
results in long stretches where more the half of the time the performer
is producing no sound at all.
I did this piece on Yehuda's concert series in Milwaukee last April. The
pianist's back faces
the audience, so the keyboard can be seen clearly, while at the same
time a live
projection of the keyboard is shown on a screen behind the piano. There
is a video of this projection at this url: http://www.vimeo.com/1282844
This composition is mentioned in _The Time of Music_ by
Jonathan Kramer.
Louie
----------------------------------------------
Mr. Yannay's program note:
I always had a fascination with the visual aspects of musical
performance. To experience what I mean, turn off volume on a filmed
performer in action. In this piece, written 42 years ago in Israel, I
incorporated the idea of composing “performed silences.” I wanted to
write a chain of short sound-blocks that connected in silence by visible
choreography performed by the fingers, hands and arms of the pianist. In
the original, pre-video version, I placed the pianist facing his back to
the audience and the piano keyboard parallel to the rows of the
audience. It occurred to me several years ago that one can now extend
the visual experience of the piece by real-time video capture and
projection of the pianist’s performing motion and add an extra dimension
to the piece. The entire piece consists of five movements. The first,
third and last movements, A, A1 and A2 have an identical score with
lingering sustained sounds that have to be held until they die out. The
pianist learns the complete score. As he performs on stage, he actually
plays one bar with sound followed by one bar played silently. This takes
place in the first and third movements in alternate arrangements. Odd
number bars aloud--even number bars silent, in the first movement and
the opposite in the third movement. In the last movement he plays all
the bars aloud. The second (“b”) and fourth (“c”) movements are fast,
busy and virtuosic: a sort of “musical spacers” between the airy,
meditative movements.The pianist in this 4/23/2008 performance is Louis
Goldstein. Audio and video by Kevin Schlei and Dale Kaminski«
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"purpose of music". Cage supposes 100 composers and asks: Supposing one of them is doing the right thing, are the rest 99 missing the point?
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