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.
Intermission 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
Intermission 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.
Intermission 3
This one is a straightforwardly 'Classical' piece with all the counterpoint to boot (I've been a bit free with fourths and seconds and sevenths but still). I recommend En blanc et noir's YouTube channel if you're at all interested in music theory. I had somehow managed never to hear of the rule of the octave in ten-plus years of music education and spending some time learning about partimento has shown me what I could work on to reach a new level in composition and/or improvisation. Michael Koch who runs the channel is keen to remind people that being a composer was a trade in the past, and composition is a skill that can be learned rather than it being divinely imparted.
It's never, ever time wasted to go back and remind yourself of the basics of whatever your craft is. Central to Western tonal music of this tradition is consonance and dissonance, and everything (everything!) that comes after is simply an extension, augmentation, expression or elaboration of this principle. Move from the I chord to the V chord and back to the I, and you have consonance, tension, resolution. Interrupt the return to the I with a vi (the vi chord is different to the I by a single note, so V-vi is called an 'interrupted' cadence as it feels like going back to the I but not quite) and you've delayed the arrival of the resolution. Move to a second phrase in the key of the V before returning to the I and you've augmented the I-V-I sequence. Does it need to be a V? It's simply the tension/dissonance inherent in it that makes it fit for purpose, so by taking a leap of imagination you could replace it with something else. An augmented chord, an aug b9, an 11, a b13, a vii°, a tritone substitution could also work. You could apply the phrase-answering phrase-phrase principle to entire sections. With successive imaginative leaps you could arrive eventually at the multi-movement work, or the Wagnerian opera cycle, all constructed to satisfy the need for something to resolve.
Way back down here on the single-short-piano-piece level, I had a little conceptual idea of applying the resolution principle across an entire piece to make it slightly more interesting than it might have been otherwise. The piece is in Ab but you'll see that it starts in Eb (the key of the V chord), moves to the vi of Ab (F minor) for the second section, and gets to the home key for the last section. The really emphatic V-I that you're hoping for doesn't come until the end and structurally the whole thing is like a V-vi-V-I with lots of decoy resolutions along the way. While there is a D-natural in the first section, I think its appearance is oblique enough not to suggest the key too emphatically, and the Db in the Bb minor chord at the end of section helps to create a feeling of ambiguity about the key (A Bb minor chord appearing in Eb would suggest that the modal Eb mixolydian is being used, or that we're in fact in Ab).
bb.19–20
OBVIOUSLY this motif reappears at the end and serves as a satisfying ii-V-I in Ab for the ultimate twofold resolution of a perfect cadence at last and this thing finally appearing its proper context.
bb.71–72
I came up with the motif to challenge myself to do something I wouldn't usually do. I remembered En blanc et noir showing something he called a rondo theme in one of his example compositions in a video and this was my half-remembered attempt at replicating something in compound time with three-part harmony in quite a narrow range. You'll also see that the motif that starts the piece and is used throughout starts with the I chord in first inversion (i.e. the root of the chord is not at the bottom). When it reappears in Ab for the third section, it is voiced more satisfyingly in root position (Ab is at the bottom).
bb.1–4
bb.43–44
And so on. Nobody doubts that music theory is difficult, but there is no part of it that isn't based on principles that are intuitive and simple. It sounds nice when you resolve something, so you have a choice of when to make it happen, how to make it happen, whether you will make it happen.
I finished this first draft in 11/09/2025 and think it's a good idea to leave it alone at the moment. I started to get a bit blind to what I was doing so the next revision will probably be a rewrite of some of the dubious and hastily-written accompaniment in the last section. The accompaniment to the Bb minor-Eb motif doesn't work everywhere that appears (in fact it might not work anywhere) so I'll probably rethink that too.
Intermission 4
My challenge for this one is to write something that is mostly silence/empty space. The sign of a good composer/musician is someone who knows how important and powerful silence is, and it's something you'll have to continually rediscover if you make music (at those points where you're not sure about what to do next, it's easy to forget that doing nothing, or at least 'less', is an option).
Have a listen to this Schubert piece at 5:40. Notice how much of the music is the performer NOT playing any music!
Intermission 5
Intermission 6