kagablog

Nightsongs (1997-99)
BWV Fragments (1999)
Remembering Stravinsky…Morges, Autumn 2001
Their Souls Go Waltzing On (2004)

Jill Richards piano

Each of these 9 short piano pieces, composed independently over a period of about nine years, has a connection with an earlier composer, sometimes even drawing on that composer’s music: Bach (2 pieces), Satie (3 pieces), Ives/Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Cole Porter and Meade Lux Lewis. They could be portraits or homages or reflections; but in any event these are all composers whose work has been important for my own composition. I think of these short pieces as my workshop, an opportunity to try out techniques that can be developed in subsequent larger-scale compositions.

Nightsongs takes apart, and then puts together differently, all the Cole Porter songs I know with “night” in the title plus the very chromatic I concentrate on you. The music inhabits a strange, almost expressionist world, unlike anything I’d written in more than twenty years, with fragments of Porter sometimes fleetingly remembered. I started it in London in March 1997 to play on a concert tour, but only managed to reach the double barline two years later in Grahamstown where I gave the first performance in the Beethoven Room on 5 August 1999. (Duration: c.3.5 minutes)

BWV Fragments was composed in June 1999 on the occasion of Ishbel Sholto-Douglas’ retirement from Rhodes University Music Department. Her life-long passion for Bach’s Cello Suites, which she first introduced to me when I was an undergraduate at Wits University close to three decades before, led me to use them as the source material for this little tribute. I cut and pasted, transposed and superimposed, and deliberately misread clefs, but every single note came from Bach. The first performance was given by Jill Richards in the Beethoven Room, Grahamstown on 16 May 2002. (Duration: c.1 minute)

Remembering Stravinsky… Morges, Autumn 2001 was composed in Switzerland in October 2001 while I was staying just outside Lausanne in the town of Morges, where Stravinsky had lived from 1914-1920 and composed L’Histoire du Soldat and Les Noces. Visiting his house (now the head office of Swatch), and looking out the windows at views he might have enjoyed, inspired me to write a memorial piece to that most resourceful of twentieth century composers. I worked every morning in the tranquillity of Paulette Robert’s beautiful garden and dedicated my piece to her. By a remarkable coincidence she had spent some of her childhood years in an apartment in the “Stravinsky house”. The first performance was given by Jill Richards in the Beethoven Room, Grahamstown on 16 May 2002. (Duration: c.4 minutes)

Their souls go waltzing on was requested by Slovakian composer Daniel Matej for the “Tone Roads Project”, commemorating the 130th anniversary of the births of Charles Ives and Arnold Schoenberg. In the spirit of the request I appropriated some fragments of material from Ives’ Three-Page Sonata and Schoenberg’s Five Piano Pieces Op 23. I remembered that the Ives work opens with the timeless B-A-C-H motif and on reading through the Schoenberg found it hidden away in various guises. What a perfect opportunity to include JS Bach in the manipulation of these daylight-robbed materials! Taking a cue from Op 23: No 5 (the Waltz) and the March sections in the Ives, I came up with a kind of march-waltz … or a waltz-march? The first performance was given by Daan Vandewalle during the Evenings of New Music, Bratislava on 26 November 2004. (Duration: c.2.5 minutes)