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