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 less, is an option).
Have a listen to this Schubert piece at 5:40. Notice how much of the music is Alfred Brendel NOT playing any music!
Intermission 5
This is an continuation of the techniques I used in my piece Innoculum that I never finished. I'm using rhythmic and metric techniques I picked up from learning about Meshuggah and looking for sequences that allow me to move through keys in unexpected ways. The stuff in the images above was what I thought would be the outline for the piece but for a bunch of reasons the rhythm stuff doesn't quite work like how I remembered it so I've had to reset. There are some nice nice harmonic sequences in there but I will use in some way. I was also trying to avoid copying the sequence from Innoculum that I used and possibly invented but since I never finished it I think it will be okay to use part of it in an appropriate place.
Here are some slightly different versions of the start. I've had to write off a lot of work from doing it the way I thought I could do it so I've taken only the stuff that I think works. I'll use this as the starting point, I think it will be interesting to shape the piece in kind of episodes of texture like this and invent the rhythmic schemes I need for transitionary stuff.
I think v. 3 is the right one or closest to it:
Intermission 6
Intermission 7
Intermission 8
This one is going to be an exercise in simplicity, no drama, no modulating, no fortissimo, just a theme and the basics of music theory to create something nice. All substance over style. I find that very difficult to do, it feels like I haven't really done any work if playing it isn't a challenge in some way, but it is possible to hide behind technique to avoid engaging more deeply with structure.
When you're dealing with not a lot like this, everything has to be in exactly the right place. It's like a little poem where one word misplaced or too many can bloat or ruin the momentum of the whole thing. Pretty much everything I need is in the improvs and noodling below, it will be a case of refining it until it's 100% lean (you'll get the idea of what the main 'theme' is).
I can't quite figure out an overarching principle for it yet. It could be A A' B A, or more like variations with just the A material, or maybe the whole thing will be based on the harmonic progression of whatever I decide is the definitive version of the A section. Anything over three minutes will be too long for this piece, so it could more cynically be 80% repetition of the theme with some thoughtfully-placed variation and decoration to fill the rest of the space. Maybe the principle to get me started could be 'repeat the theme, except where it gets repetitive, at which point vary it'. Or, 'repeat it until you can't'. Anyway you only learn by doing so it'll be interesting to listen to the drafts I'll make and figure out they work or don't work.
The second improv contains the most ideas but the first most closely resembles what I think will be the form of the finished piece and contains some horsing around with Jingle Bells too.
26/05/2026
I think I've got an idea of the shape of the piece and decided the intro and first section. I'm finding that everything I change here has a bit of a butterfly effect on the whole rest of the piece so it's really important to know exactly what I'm doing and what kind of piece I'm trying to write from the outset. I'm trying to build it by doing a lot of playing rather than just planning so it should take shape through the improvisations I add here. Here's the first that I think contains what will pretty much remain the outline for the intro and first section.
I was also playing around with the major-sounding stuff yesterday which featured occasionally in my earlier improvs. It starts to sound like more cliched Dorian stuff with the IV in so you want to use it sparingly. I think I'll use its ambiguity in the right context as my transitional material to get me from the B back into the A section. There are some nice ideas in here.
I'm trying to avoid doing my my put-the-loud-and-cool-stuff-at-the-end form both in the interest of pushing myself to learn new things and because it wouldn't be appropriate for this quite gentle and understated piece. I do have a lot of material that serves as heightened-drama and heightened-emotion versions of the theme so the choice I'm facing is whether to have a bit of end-weightedness and put this in the last section, or whether to flatten any sense of long-range development like that and put everything you're going to hear in each section the first time you hear it. What it's easy to forget once you've studied music a little bit is that casual listeners don't really hear or care about form, they're just listening to a 'vibe' and want to hear the good stuff lots of times.
01/06/2026
Got a bit of a draft of the start. Again all careful decisions here so only subtle changes. I'm trying to use the harmony changes sparingly so they seem like variation later.
Intermission 9
I've finally found a place for a piece I wrote in 2022 that didn't really fit anywhere. It was preliminary work for a big big piece that I never got any further with. Anyway it's a fairly short toccata-like piece that will fit nicely here.
This was written as an ending to a big project so I think it will work as a nice statement here with my plans for number 10.
Intermission 10
Anytime you have a set of ten like this of anything, the tenth has to be pretty special. It has to be a bit of a break with the rest and show where you could go next. No ideas yet so I think I'll write it last and use everything I've learned while writing the others.
Notes
15/05/2026
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Here's some bonus nonsense from my voice notes. This is an improvisation from 15th July 2024:
13/05/2026
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I've made a proper start on 2 and kind of have a structure. Overall shape is a a weird dissonant bit in the middle that moves downwards (everything I need for that is in the improvisations), with the outer sections in Eb. I know exactly how the third section sounds but getting there and deciding what the first section should be, i.e. what the balance is, is it end-weighted, is section one the same material as section three, is the challenge. Think I already have material for a short coda in the improvisations too.
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3 is quite hard to play actually. Been learning it and it's quite hard to memorise.
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Have a structure for 4 which is going to be an adagio or something slow with lots of space and silence as I planned. I have a repeated G-D-G open chord that is contextualised by surrounding modal material. I've found a list of every scale/mode that contains G and D and recorded a bunch of improvisations. You can start to find structure straight away by dividing the scales into ones where the G and D have tonic function, dominant function, or cases where it's a bit more ambiguous and exotic and categorisation is based more on colour and subjective interpretation. That allows you to decide which sections serve as resolution and which increase or maintain tension. Improvisation allows you to discover motifs or themes for each scale/mode which gives more insight into where each section might fall in the structure. I'm using the very nice idea, which has been done plenty of times before, of something repeating objectively unchanged throughout a piece but subjectively changed by what's happening around it. The G-D-G will punctuate every phrase and I've tried out some of kind of palindromic two-voice counterpoint structure that is starting to sound a bit too like tintinnabuli which is where I got the idea from, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but might be a bit too rigid or sound like straightforward copying without imagination. It could be a nice idea for improvisation to play a role in the construction of each section, but just doing whatever you like is a recipe for even more compositional problems. Constraints and limitations are really important when creating something so the challenge I'm facing with the one is deciding where along the spectrum of compositional freedom and rigidity the structure should fall before I start working on it properly. I also have a really nice gestural thing that I think will end the piece so in the finished product will probably some kind of combination of all these ideas. Actually, having written this and read it back, I think the tintinnabuli thing could be the first section. That will be the theme and everything else can be motivically related to it some way without needing to be rigidly structurally the same. Kind of hidden variations. That gives some kind of constraint but gives plenty of space for variation.
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5 was supposed to be done and dusted quickly but I've gone and dug myself into a hole trying to decide on details and have almost nothing as a result. Might need to wipe everything I've done so far and think of it as a fresh piece that I'll make out of just a couple of ideas.
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I believed 6 was pretty much finished before Christmas but after revisiting to finish the last details it needs a whole new last section and ending. Bit more a 'dance' this one which is something composers should really be acquainted with . I've made it more out of 'gestures' so I should stop attempting to correct all of the counterpoint as it's not supposed to be 'correct' in that idiom. I've got this book of rote pieces that is really helpful for the people I teach so a piece like this can be really rewarding to play. Have a feeling that doing less might be the answer here.
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I've got an improvisation that I think is the basis for 7. It's just me playing a pentatonic scale and up down really fast with the pedal down but reaching progressively higher. It's oddly compelling and I think there can be a structure in there in some kind of spectral way. Maybe I can create melody lines that counterpoint the highest note by accenting notes in the scale or just have a sequence of notes that emerge or something. It's really nice to listen to blanket textures like this on piano with all those overtones making phantom notes so it's good to have an excuse to do so, and plus it will be like a scale exercise which is always a good thing.
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I had a cool idea of performing/recording each one in a different place in the world. Obviously I'm not going to have the means to travel to Okinawa and such at this point in my life but I'm sure there are plenty of amazing places within reach. I could use these pieces to play in unusual and interesting places, not the obvious recording places but obscure and unexpected places that have pianos in that are deep in rural parts of places I've never been. Like a church in some town in Ireland then down some backstreet somewhere in Germany then in a house in Orkney, that kind of thing.