A new work composed by Caitlin and her Bastard Assignments colleague Edward Henderson, for ROLI Seaboard Block and piano.
Premiered at Sheffield Chamber Music Festival in May 2022.
dot drip line line
Text score for a performed piece of any duration for any number of performers.
This piece is currently in development. At present, the intention is:
The score for this piece contains a simple text which each performer should use to create an entire notebook of variants which will serve as a handbook of ideas from which to develop a live performance version of the initial score. The notebooks should be displayed (open at a single spread) where the audience can see them at the performance. The variants may be drawn (using wet and/or dry media), collaged, described, included as video or audio of a performance interpretation (performers may want to consider the use of QR codes to include these digitally recorded versions in their books), or any other form or media that comes to mind.
The final performance may take any form the performer chooses. Performances that are created as scores become separate but related works, which can be performed in future by performers who have not undertaken the notebook process.
Current scores developed from dot drip line line are:
- dot drip line line 8317: Fall for speaker, 3 whistlers and 1 dripper
- dot drip line line 8918: EDGE for vocal soloist
More or Less
with Alexandra Kremakova
More or Less is a set of piano variations written in collaboration with the pianist Alexandra Kremakova for the John Halford Competition at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in 2014. Drawing on a visual conceit of zooming in and out of maps, the variations proceed in two directions from the theme – one set becoming more and more complex, adding runs and spreading out across the full range of the keyboard, while the other set becomes progressively simpler, reducing down to the simplest form that can still convey the theme – four held notes.
Duration: ca 5 minutes
The collaboration
More or Less developed over the course of about four months, starting from initial broad discussions and proceeding through regular meetings, sometimes just talking, sometimes mixing discussion with playing viol duets (Alexandra plays treble viol, I play tenor), but mostly at the piano.
The idea behind the theme was to explicitly use intervals which we both love – perfect fifths for Alexandra, tritones for me, octaves for both of us. There’s a certain reflection, I feel, of our shared enjoyment of early music in this theme. Alex’s response to the theme was that its sparseness reminded her a little of reductive analysis, and she suggested that it could be the basis of a set of variations. I was already feeling that the theme had a sort of kinship with Erik Satie’s Vexations, and it seemed that variations might be a useful way to handle the material and that this might provide scope to explore both our shared interests and different ways of thinking about music.
The challenge was to find a way into the piece that would give the variations a purpose. I feel that many sets of variations quickly devolve into showing off technique, and we both wanted to avoid that. Alex also likes to find a narrative or visual aspect of pieces she plays which she uses to create her interpretation.
From the idea of reductive analysis and the simplification of complex ideas, I drew a mental parallel with the way Google Maps works: you zoom in to see the detail of streets, local landmarks and businesses; zoom out for context, reducing the place you just saw in such detail to a mere dot connected to other dots. From this came the idea of two sets of variations, interleaving but with the conceptual distance between them widening as the piece progresses.
With this concept in mind and with the variations sketched out, we worked together over a number of sessions to make the piece a more coherent whole. In particular, Alex suggested ways to make the music more pianistic, especially in the more complex variations; I worked to adjust the music to create a more lively harmonic world, within its very static parameters, principally by interpolating a cycle of fifths as interjections of single notes between each variation.
I also adjusted the opening of Variation 2a to be a direct quote from Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, in reference to Liszt being the composer Alex was playing the first time I heard her perform.
I’m still not a huge fan of variations (although I have now discovered exceptions to this rule, most notably Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated) but I’m really glad to have worked on this piece with Alex, and I feel that together we have managed to create a work which reflects our different approaches as well as tying together our common interests.
from the explanatory notes in the score.
Since its first performance at Bastard Assignments, Alexandra Kremakova has also performed More or Less twice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, and at the Barbican.
Preview the score of More or Less (click on the score to open full-screen):
In Detail
Written for pianist Valentina Pravodelov, In Detail is a response to the first four of Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Régards sur l’Enfant Jésus, the opening pieces of a programme of solo piano works focused on religious and mystical subject matter. The programme also included Sofia Gubaidulina’s Toccata Troncata and Liszt’s Funerailles, as well as music by Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev.
Click through to Flickr for larger sizes and detail shots
Valentina asked for a meditative piece that would be less than three minutes long. I deliberately took a linear approach to contrast with the strong harmonic bias of the other works on the programme and present a different type of meditation.
In Detail also has roots in a visual art piece, Maps of Seville, that I created for another (unfinished) work. It has a completely different feel from the artwork – especially texturally! – but relates to the detail view – up close, even bold straight lines display a mass of irregularities.
The title relates to the saying “God is in the detail” and refers to the need for the pianist to focus on tiny details of sonority, duration, touch and rhythmic angularity and instability. Notes of unspecified duration allow the pianist to adapt the piece according to the needs of their programme, the size of the venue, and the nature of the instrument available.
Glacier, for Stephen Montague
For my teacher Stephen Montague’s 70th birthday celebrations, the composers at Trinity Laban were all asked to write a ‘piece on a postcard’ to celebrate the occasion. Glacier, for Stephen Montague is my contribution to this project.
Given that Stephen’s role as my tutor is largely to help me explore more experimental ways of thinking about music, I didn’t just want to write a piece but wanted instead to do some small-scale exploration. The postcard I used (pictured below) was one I found in a secondhand bookshop in Greenwich, Halcyon Books and is of a painting of the Glacier of Rosenlaui in Switzerland by John Brett. I started thinking about creaking ice and how I might be able to create a similar effect on the piano. The work uses mostly the strings inside the piano and largely consists of scraping a card up the strings towards the hammers, and striking the strings with card, the hand or the fingers. Keys are depressed silently in order to create pitches to reverberate after the action directly on the strings.
The performance here is by Caitlin Rowley, from a private performance at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Friday 3 May 2013.
Egg the Eleventh: An odd fugue for Francis Western-Smith
Written for composer and pianist/organist Francis Western-Smith for February 2012’s Lucky Dip album project, Egg the Eleventh has strong ties to the other keyboard ‘eggs’ I have written. Its being a fugue was the result of a Twitter challenge from Francis 🙂
Egg the Tenth: A Whitman Interlude
Egg the Tenth started out as a piano interlude to my short song-cycle, Three Whitman Songs but pretty quickly developed ideas above its station and became too long to be appropriate for the setting, so I pulled it out and let it stand on its own.
Like many of the other piano ‘eggs’, the harmonic world Egg the Tenth occupies is a little quirky, but technically it’s not difficult to play. It should also work well on harpsichord.
2 by 4
Eggs 6 through to 9 were written as a set of not-terribly-strict two-part inventions for piano or harpsichord in 2006/7 as a way of easing myself back into composition after an extended period without writing anything.
The two-line challenge proved perfect for the situation. I used the opportunity to explore melodic development and counterpoint a little, and while all four pieces are quite clearly individual works, they share a common approach and feel. While briefly Bach-like in places, these Eggs are far from pastiche, although they are perhaps among the more ‘traditional’ in approach of my compositions.
These recordings are MIDI realisations.
Egg the Fifth
Egg the Fifth was the first piece I wrote after a protracted period of compositional inactivity. It is a small-scale, slimly textured piece, stylistically related to the more contemplative items from The Four-Egg Omelette which I wrote in 1998.
Written for solo piano, it is technically very simple and should be playable by pianists above about grade 2.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
catharsis
catharsis grew out of a clash of priorities between my composition and my dayjob. With little time to compose, I became increasingly frustrated, leading to this work which is probably more cathartic for the composer than for the performer!
This recording is a MIDI-generated performance.
Pieces of Eight: A frivolity in eight parts
Pieces of Eight was written in response to a ‘call for scores’ from French chamber group Ensemble Décadanse who were embarking on a project entitled 2000 miniatures for the year 2000. They were asking for groups of pieces, each item of which was no longer than 10 seconds in duration.
Taking up the challenge, I viewed each piece as a window onto another – hypothetical – larger piece.
Pieces of Eight exists in several versions by the composer:
- flute/violin, B-flat clarinet, cello/double bass & piano – the original version written for Ensemble Décadanse
- soprano saxophone, violin, viola, double bass & piano for Australian group Topology who performed this version at the MiniMax Festival in Brisbane in 20o2
- string quartet
- solo piano, premiered by Luca Tieppo at a London Composers Forum concert in 2011
- solo pedal harp, written for American harpist Shana Norton who recorded it for the Lucky Dip project in 2012.
Additionally, Pieces of Eight was arranged by composer and oboist Catherine Pluygers for the ensemble of the London New Wind Festival who performed it in London in 2009.
The recording here is of the first performance of the piano version, by Italian pianist and composer Luca Tieppo at the London Composers Forum‘s lunchtime concert at St Mary’s, Putney in London, 7 October 2011
Shimmer
Shimmer was composed in 1998 for Newcastle (NSW) pianist Rob Kelly. While it may sound at times a little like Debussy, its roots are strongly in the music of Stravinsky – especially structurally.
The structure of the work was created along the lines of Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which consists of fragments of themes juxtaposed against each other, chopping and changing, but gradually building a series of thematic lines through the piece.
Shimmer has two principal ‘lines’, one free and quasi-improvisatory; the other more rhythmic and structured.
The performance here, by Jeanell Carrigan, is from the Vox Australis CD Hammered (Australian Post-1970 Piano Music, Vol. 3) VAST027-2, released 2000 and available to buy from the Australian Music Centre.
Shimmer also exists in an alternate version for piano and percussion.
haiku I
haiku I started life as a student exercise for Peter Sculthorpe’s Composition Workshop at Sydney Uni. Given 10 minutes to come up with a short work drawing inspiration from haiku poetry, I composed a short piano piece using the pentatonic scale and drawing its musical structure from the poetical structure of haiku – 3 lines (sections) of seven, nine and seven syllables (bars) respectively.
Originally written for ‘normal’ piano, haiku I was reworked for prepared piano* in 1998 and recorded (rather erratically…) by the composer as a score for Simone O’Callaghan’s web film Fetisssh (no longer online).
* The piano is prepared by attaching metal paperclips to some of the strings of the piano
The Four-Egg Omelette
Egg the First
One day while browsing around the music library at Sydney University, I spotted a score of somebody’s “complete oeuvre” which I at first misread as being their “complete oeufs“. The idea of issuing a set of “complete eggs” appealed to me (still does 🙂 ) and so when I started to write a set of short piano pieces shortly afterwards, they became the beginning of a series of ‘piano eggs’.
The Four-Egg Omelette comprises the first four of these ‘eggs’ and was written in 1994. The style is somewhat quirky and free-ranging, but quite dramatic in ‘Egg the First’ and ‘Egg the Fourth’. ‘Egg the Third’ is a waltz (“Sunny-side up”) and ‘Egg the Second’ is a short Interlude.
This recording is a MIDI realisation of ‘Egg the First’ (hence its somewhat heavy-handed approach with the accents). The key feature of this piece is setting a five-note ostinato in the left hand against a melodic right-hand part which ranges across a number of metres.
Other Eggs
The series of piano eggs continues. Other pieces in the series are:
- Egg the Fifth
- 2 by 4: Eggs the Sixth, Seventh, Eighth and Ninth, a set of two-part inventions
- Egg the Tenth, a stand-alone Interlude
- Egg the Eleventh