#figmentum

The purpose of this post is to share a new recording, but also to provide some context around the piece and the circumstances in which I came to compose it. Like many composers, I frequently get requests for scores for perusal and, of course, most of these come to nothing. That’s ok: I’m happy to share my music with people who are interested whether or not they end up performing it. However, last year one such request from the San Diego-based ensemble Figmentum led to a very fruitful exchange and is a great example of how these unexpected requests can lead you down new pathways and to places where you may make new discoveries.

After looking at some of my scores, Figmentum gave a lovely performance of lines that have been drawn on photographs of sculpture in November last year:

However, they also asked me about music that I had written for the toy piano, since their ensemble specialises in music for that instrument and especially in performing as an ensemble for toy pianos. It was through this discussion that I discovered that my piece boxmusic for toy piano is actually written for the largest size of the instrument and this is not the model of toy piano that they use. Even though there is some flexibility in the score for boxmusic, we couldn’t work out a meaningful way for it to work with their instruments and still sound like the same piece.

So, optimistically, I suggested that I would write a new piece for the toy piano models that they perform with. Even more optimistically, I thought I would write it in January this year. Of course, that did not happen – I finished the piece somewhat closer to Easter – but it was the first piece that I completed in 2019 and I was very grateful for the inspiration to compose it.

My first intention was to write a piece that was for one or more toy pianos. In a sense what I wrote reflects this, but I also ended up with a score with more extended options. My initial idea was to create music that was similar in character to boxmusic - that is based on a serial row – but flexible in performance in the same way that my saxophone quartet work for 1, 2, 3 or 4 saxophones is. When I came to write the piece, I wrote a large number of melodic fragments from 1 to 10 notes that were determined by the compass of the 30 key toy piano. However, I then decided that the linear approach to the music that I had originally planned no longer suited it.

After some deliberation, I ended up approaching the score for this piece as I have done many graphic scores. The melodic fragments that I had made were cut up and distributed across the 10 pages of score in various directions so as to dissuade a linear interpretation. In a similar manner to some of the decorative practices that I’ve used in my Anglo Saxon scores, the music notation itself became a kind of ‘border’ to the score – itself decorative – leaving me with a space in the middle of each page. Text and music and their intersection are another area of interest to me, and I had already decided to fill this space with a text, but a specific one did not immediately suggest itself to me. This was another block, until I decided to express the connection between the ‘border’ and the Anglo Saxon scores by re-using the poem that I had written as part of the process of the piece séo níedhæmestre; se tidfara. I worked with some very brief fragments of this poem, performing oulipo procedures similar to those that I had used to create the original text, and then further cut up, distributed, and arranged the fragments in the same manner as the musical fragments. 

Hopefully, this description of the process explains the title: collagemusic is intended to be both explicit about its method of composition and its relationship to my previous solo toy piano piece. Rather than describing the piece as only for toy pianos, I gave the designation “for one or more toy pianos or melody instruments” along with the instruction that all of parts of the notation could be used. I specified “melody instruments” since I think it important that some of the pitches are heard in any performance, but of course there are ways that the text or other aspects of the score could be performed by musicians or performers who cannot realise melodies (e.g. untuned percussion, electronics, speakers, etc). Here is the recording made by Figmentum, who gave the first performance at their end of season concert on 14th June 2019:

What I love about this recording is that it surprised me when I heard it. I already knew that, as an ensemble, Figmentum were very familiar with working with open scores and that they were not likely to make a linear interpretation of the piece (such as to play all the notes on all the pages from 1 – 10, or a similar approach). However, in their interpretation they also found something about the notation and revealed it in their performance that offers a different perspective from the one that I had when I was composing the piece.

First, the element of repetition is one that really works for the music. When I heard this, I immediately linked it to the processes that I used to create the score and the processes that are evident in the text. It really expresses something about the music to me, and yet this is something that I didn’t feel aware of until I heard this performance. Second, I really like the way that the ensemble used variation in pace and texture to structure the piece. Again, having heard this it is very clear to me how it links with the notation, but this was also not something I focused on when creating the music because I was thinking about how I used a similar procedure to create each page of the score. Finally, I really enjoy the instrumentation that they chose for the performance. There are three toy pianos and they are paired with wind instruments (flute and clarinet). These aren’t all the instruments that are played by the group, although they show how although toy pianos are part of their specialism this isn’t the limit of their soundworld. But the combination that they chose shows their variety of sound along with their unique ensemble sound too, and for me brings out both the similarities and subtle differences in the musical material.