“atendant, souffrir”, lists, little stars [2013]

for two pianos

duration :: 16’

Commissioned by the TRANSIT Festival

First performance :: Ian Pace and Frederik Croene — TRANSIT Festival (Leuven, Belgium), 27 October 2013

The ground slides away: no zone of concentration holds for long: the interior intricacies of the key mechanism, its internal stops and half-arrested motions that yield the most intensely impalpable pianissimos if they succeed in sounding at all and make of the simplest figures a demanding, tensely and privately virtuosic exercise; the elided distinction between harmony, voicing and articulation; the air above this monstrous pair of machines keeping the two musicians farther apart than they'd like to be, a point halfway between them that neither can reach.

The piece begins with a proposal for how to proceed, and declines to accept it.  Instead, a series of zero points are reached, inhabited, and abandoned, coalescing like hollow knots out of a long string of awkward, individuated gestures: lists, little stars, and waves of imbalance, and an increasingly tense and unstable dialogue of long silences. Hovering behind, its melodic material and harmonic predilections more or less graspable, sometimes, as fodder for a welter of momentary fragments of canons and figures, is Philopoctus de Caserta's late fourteenth-century motet "En atendant souffrir m'estuet grief payne". “Waiting, I must suffer great torments…”

“atendant, souffrir”, lists, little stars, commissioned for Ian Pace and Frederik Croene by the TRANSIT Festival, is dedicated to my wife.