CD Booklet Notes – 24 Preludes (2019–20)
(Numbers in boxes refer to tracks on the CD.)
It was the standard piano repertoire that fuelled my love of music from the very start. Two composers, Beethoven and Bartók, shine out like beacons over the decades. My early over-ambitious attempts at playing through Beethoven’s sonatas implanted the infinite variety of his œuvre into my consciousness from a very young age. And from the start of my piano lessons, my enlightened teacher avoided setting me those pictorial posies describing fairies at the bottom of the garden and cows looking longingly over village gates, in favour of the exhilarating brave new world of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, – the succulent, scrunching clusters of ‘Melody in the Mist’ from Volume 4 lives with me to the present day; indeed, I pay tribute to it in more than one of these 24 Preludes.
Following the historical precedent of Bach, Chopin, Rachmaninov Debussy, Shostakovich, and others in previous generations, in 2019–20 I wrote 24 preludes to reflect the challenge of enriching the piano repertoire in the beguilingly diverse musical climate of the present century. The music is intended to allow for flexible programming: a group taken from the 24 can be played alongside other new music or older repertoire, or the complete set (lasting around 65 minutes) could be performed in a more contemporary setting.
Variety and unity are twin issues that I grapple with whenever I set out to write a new work. They have very much formed part of the process of a composition in 24 distinct parts and lasting over an hour: examples include the jagged 9ths of the first prelude which are softened into something much more conciliatory in the final fugue, and harmony built on clusters are employed in several of the preludes from the violent in ‘Drums’ [12] and ‘Birthday Bash’ [23] to the triumphantly clangourous ‘Coming Together’ [2] and the dreamily atmospheric ‘A Childhood Memory’ [8]. In the spirit of doing more with less. I have employed restricted modes in some of the pieces: ‘Klezfest’ [3], ‘Tango for Two Saxophones and Broken Accordion’ [5], and ‘Samatha’ [15]; palindromes can be found – the 11th prelude is an exact reversal of the first prelude and ‘Madam I’m Adam’ [4] and ‘Mini Mambo’ [22] contain palindromic procedures.
‘Prelude No. 1’ [1] is a one-minute call for attention, in the manner of the opening bars of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony or Beethoven’s Eroica. The cold shower of the ritenuto that is this first prelude acts as an upbeat to contextualise the gentle shock of the F major triad that opens ‘Coming Together’ [2]. This exploration of bells and resonances celebrates community with an evolving harmonic diversity – until the final fade-out, no two chords in the main chorale idea are identical.
‘Klezfest’ [3], is a piece about my heritage and more particularly about Yiddish humour. The gift of laughing to conquer potential catastrophe is a wonderful characteristic of the Jewish people, and here, within a tightly limited modal framework, I pay tribute to aspects of klezmer, complete with instrumentation suggestions for a group that might be found at Bar Mitzvahs and Jewish wedding receptions.
‘Madam I’m Adam’ [4], is the first of three monodies in the set. As the title implies, it’s a palindrome, and so I only had to write half of this very brief piece…. My obsession with the piano, not only as an instrument inhabiting its own sound world but also uniquely able to suggest other instrumental groups, is further explored in the fifth prelude, ‘Tango for Two Saxophones and Broken Accordion’ [5], which stays within the range of those instruments (although I can’t be sure what the range of a broken accordion is). A possible musical ancestor here is Debussy’s ‘La Puerto del Vino’ from Préludes, Book 2, along with the visual world of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The impression should be that of an illicit union in a nocturnal place where no person in his or her right mind would choose to go. ‘Siciliano’ [6], is bucolic and lilting, with a chaste obsession with the interval of the perfect fourth.
Although I am not often an aficionado of pop or rock music, I have in the past been shaken and occasionally stirred by the raw energy of the vernacular sounds of my youth. ‘Lift Off’ [7], which is dedicated to my son Benjamin, a guitarist and songwriter, owes something to that very sophisticated prog rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer, who were at their height when I was a teenager. The next prelude, ‘Childhood Memory’ [8], which should follow without a break, is perhaps the most impressionistic piece in the set, dreamlike and nebulous and reflecting my youthful fascination with cloud formations, particularly in the beguiling colours of cumulonimbus clouds just before a violent storm –
…which erupts in ‘In The Cold Light of Day’ [9]. This prelude was written to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya. A former pupil of Shostakovich, she wrote music as pitiless and violent as any composer previously or since.
‘The Girl with the White Parasol’10], is a piece very close to my heart; the title is derived from a memorable speech in the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane. This prelude could have been created in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, and I imagine it as somehow ‘discovered’ rather than written by myself. Limitless in its nostalgia, it describes a beautiful and precious moment that happens just once in a lifetime. After this island of feeling, the total detachment of ‘11 edulerP’ [11], seems appropriate. A palindrome of ‘Prelude No. 1’, it leads neatly to ‘Drums’ [12], which both celebrates the piano as a multi-percussion instrument and indulges my ongoing passion with most things percussive.
‘Sliding Doors’ [13], is a mini suite of three pieces that all start with identical material but travel in different directions. It is a comedy with a fragile culmination. The F sharp and the E that conclude the piece act as a bridge for ‘Adagietto’ [14]. Dedicated to my wife, Elizabeth, this intentionally Mahlerian nocturne not only pays homage to the fourth movement of that composer’s Fifth Symphony but also features the throbbing rhythmic heartbeats that start his Symphony No. 9.
This prelude is the first of a series of slow movements that could be thought of as the emotional and spiritual heart of the complete set (until the final fugue, that is). ‘Samatha’ [15] (a Buddhist term for tranquillity of the mind) is a five-minute meditation – the softer and slower, the better. ‘Survivor’ [16] is dedicated to Clare Hammond and, although I am full of admiration for her extraordinary pianistic technique and dexterity I wanted to pay tribute to her true inner musicality in this second of three monodies – a ‘cello solo’ which can be played by either the left or right hand, with an added ‘cathedral’ acoustic provided by the sostenuto pedal.
Following the tradition of Chopin and Shostakovich I have followed a traditional key-pattern throughout these preludes, in this case moving downwards through the circle of fifths following the major/minor scheme. Some of the preludes could be described as atonal, or pan-tonal, or indeed ‘percussive’, but I think there are enough diatonic signposts to guide the listener in an overall tonal direction. ‘Autumn Leaf’ [17], a study in fragility and poignancy, is clearly in a harmonically extended C sharp minor, although the piece starts in C minor. The silent bars are as significant as the ones containing notes.
‘Globalisation’ [18] attempts to capture a scene of gamelan-like innocence, complete with bamboo flute and gongs. Here I make my one foray into preparing the piano by asking the pianist to insert two tuners’ wedges in the gaps between the strings (in this case, the F sharp above middle C), to give a dry drum-like sound. The detuned octaves that dominate the piece are eventually infected by chords of richer harmonies, at first insidious, but becoming more menacing. ‘Valse Triste’ [19] is a brooding and melancholic nocturne with one wild outburst from which it never fully recovers.
The next four preludes mark an overall increase in excitement and goal-directed dynamism. The constantly exhilarating sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti are the inspiration behind ‘Ouverture Française’ [20] (the title notwithstanding). The third of the three monodies, this purposeful and resolute piece recalling the style of a Baroque French Overture is dedicated to my daughter, Juliette (a fluent French speaker.) ‘Prelude No. 21’ [21] follows the implications of the first and eleventh Preludes, this time at full speed for less than a minute. ‘Mini Mambo’ [22] is a short homage to the pungent harmonic and rhythmic idiom of the outstanding music-theatre works of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, complete with twelve-tone theme and a brash and vulgar coda. The penultimate prelude, ‘Birthday Bash’ [23] pushes the stark brutality of ‘Drums’ [12] with reckless abandon into a new manic and frantic territory.
At the start of this project, I flirted briefly with the idea of writing 24 Preludes and Fugues. But I soon talked myself out of this impossibly ambitious enterprise, realising that Bach is the true master of fugue, and that what I could produce would only be a pale compromise. In any case, the final prelude ending in C major ‘Fugue’ [24] took considerably more time to write than any of the other preludes, and at just over seven minutes is the longest and most complex piece in the set. After a jagged opening, with a prominence given to the interval of the ninth, the music settles into something tranquil and flowing unlike anything heard previously. Towards the end, a fleeting reference is made to ‘The Girl with the White Parasol’ – I couldn’t resist it!
24 Preludes were written for Clare Hammond who recorded them on the Toccata label CD TOCC 0620. She has performed selections of the preludes at various concerts and gave the first complete performance of the preludes along with RNCM keyboard students at the Royal Northern College of Music on June 22nd, 2022.