INTERMISSIONS (2025– )
Instrumentation: Piano
I think I'll keep things pretty loose with these little pieces. No real rules, but they'll come from improvisations and allow me to try things out without the need to develop ideas too rigorously.
Technically an 'intermezzo' is an intermission but ignore that. The Intermezzo from 2023 is separate from the stuff here.
1
I still work at the Canterbury Christ Church University, which I've been milling around at since I took the music access course here in 2012. Across that time I've witnessed the gradual retraction and now disappearance of its once-thriving music department and the music building now sits largely abandoned, a dozen or so pianos sat alone wishing they could be played.
I find a lot of Yamaha grands difficult to play as merely stroking a low key releases a thunderous cacophony of bass that resonates for minutes on end while it is necessary to contort your right hand into unseemly angles to produce the balance needed to give prominence to higher notes. CCCU has at least one that is moderately normal to play, however, so the decimation of arts and culture and gradual retraction of public services and life-enriching opportunities for development and black cloud of marketisation that is steadily engulfing everything we depend on for our wellbeing has one beneficiary in the form of me who gets to go and play this forgotten piano while I'm at work sometimes.
I recorded the below improvisation on the 30th August 2024. A lot of good ideas really do come from unselfconsciously experimenting--I've never quite been able to figure out 'the' sound of the lydian scale, and I'd been playing around with it the day before to see if I could stumble on something. Then for no particular reason I wondered whether there was such thing as a lydian minor scale and went off on a tangent reading about that and lydian diminished and lydian dominant (a lot of interchangeable names here, lydian dominant is also called the acoustic scale and not all of the names really make any sense). I can't quite remember which but I ended up having played around with two of them enough that I had them at my fingertips the next day.
I played this absentmindedly then got up and went back to work. I sometimes record my little improvisations just in case there's something in there that I can expand upon later, but this time I think the idea of switching between these two modes (I probably imagined I was using lydian major and lydian minor, whether I actually was or not) was conceptually fresh enough that when combined with not really thinking about what I was doing it birthed something that kind of resembles a piece of music. I thought it was a bit hokey at first, particularly that chromatic bassline part at the end, but after a while I started to like listening to it.
Transcribing it was a real challenge. I've never been forced to identify chords that don't make any tonal sense like this before so my ear is really lacking in that respect. A lot of trial and error, but I was quite surprised by how little I had to change form-wise. I had some reservations about the final chord and even on the day of recording changed my mind about leaving it out from take to take, but by now I've listened to the original so much that it feels like a natural part of the piece. Repetition legitimises, as we know, so I do have some doubt about whether it's the right ending or whether it 'sounds' right just by having listened to it too much. What kind of authority was the past me, after all? If you happen to want to play the piece and you're reading this, feel free to make your own ending up.
Why not buy the score here: https://buymeacoffee.com/lukemadamsz/e/384568.
I recorded the piece on the 9th March at Goldsmiths Studios. I liked it a lot so wanted to get it out quickly in 2024 but my work on Quiet Songs happened and became my priority for a while then working on that made me want to finish climbing the mountain of the '19–'21 Mix. A fun fact is that despite studying at Goldsmiths for two years, this was the first time I stepped foot in the studio. They also have a Yamaha grand and aside from Strongroom's Kawai I'd say this is probably the most perfect piano I've ever played.
Intermission @ Goldsmiths Studios
Intermission @ Goldsmiths Studios (Original Video)
Intermission — Take 1
2
Something like this maybe.
Definitely want to use that rhythmic motif as an anchor/restriction. One of the great pleasures of forging your own artistic identity is getting to plagiarise the stuff you love and enjoy playing. I'm sure I'm plagiarising the general feeling of this which was one of my favourites and featured in my repertoire when I was briefly a restaurant pianist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_v3ccyTLK4 (but not too closely, obviously. Steal properly).
I've also had an idea for a while to write a piece that is strictly in pianissimo, and imagined it sounding like this. Maybe that idea will inform this piece somehow.