Shambolic
Prelude #3: let's take a look at the mess under the hood...
Most of these Preludes for bitKlavier draw inspiration from earlier pieces of music. It’s fitting, however, given the name of Prelude #3 (Shambolic), that I have absolutely no idea if that’s the case for this one. In fact, I can’t remember anything about making it at all. I’ve found some messy notes where I can see some of the materials being worked over, but that’s it. I can perhaps defend this with some wisdom from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his theories of flow, which suggest that our basic memory functions downshift when lost in a creative moment, and in general I have scant memories of how I make things. I like to think this is a virtue, as I am rarely beholden to ideas I come up with in the moment, and don’t become attached to techniques or approaches to composition the way I might if I had clear memories of them or chose to document them.
So for this one, I’ll make a stab at some creative reconstruction, and also take a little look at how the preparations in bitKlavier work (if you aren’t familiar with how bitKlavier works, documentation is here), all of which has been interesting to me, and while I recognize myself in this piece, I could (almost) just as well be looking at a piece by someone else! Please excuse the self-indulgence.
I like to work with chorale-like textures, where lines and drones and sonorities can jostle, and that seems to have been the starting point here:
When I began this prelude project, my plan was to write 24, two in each key signature (if not key; I have already started on the other 12, though am in no rush); that is reflected here in my choice of G quarter-comma meantone tuning, and then the one-sharp key signature in the final version (pdf is included below). At some point I also circled this key signature in my planning image for the preludes, as #3:
though it’s hard to think of this one as “in G major.” My interest in the key signatures, however, is not in the implied tonal centers as much as the hand positions, bitKlavier preparations setup, notation, and, in this case, choice of tuning system.
Compound melody must have been on the mind as well, as this chorale quickly becomes a paired set of broken melodic figures, with all the flexibility (little cross-relations and anticipations) that the figuration texture allows:
Old school, but I love it, and leads me to believe I was thinking about Bach here as well, like the G-minor Presto for solo violin, or perhaps a piece like Chopin’s Prelude #14, which has some similar physicality and patterning:
Musician-Machine interaction is also a major theme in these pieces, and we see that in a subsequent presentation of compound melody, where the player doesn’t have a lot to do, but bitKlavier lends a hand (or two hands!). Here’s what the player does:
and then here is what bitKlavier interpolates (small note heads):
which puts the musician directly in contention with the internal, mechanical clock of the machine—a kind of melodic metronome that gets under the skin. This is accomplished in bitKlavier with a whole set of Synchronic preparations:
To look in a little closer, if we open up one of the Synchronic preparations, we see this:
which shows us that the played note will be repeated twice, the first time transposed down a major 7th (-11 semitones), then at the unison. This particular Synchronic is triggered by the high C# (m1) and B (m3), so we can see those transpositions and repetitions in Figure 6 above. I vaguely remember setting this up, and it was a bit of a pain, but not so bad, and is an example of how a set of bitKlavier preparations can become specific to a particular composition: bitKlavier becomes a kind of composed instrument.
In addition to putting the machine metronome in the craw of the player, this has the effect of freeing up the hands, which must have been another crucial part of what I was after here; in Figure 9, we see the hands become more occupied, interpolating a kind of negative-space countermelody (in red):
This is exactly the same as the material in Figure 5, with this countermelody inserted, and also still has the mechanical Synchronic elaborations from Figure 6; it starts to get a bit out of hand, literally and figuratively, and I think playing ALL these notes without the machine helping out with the Synchronic echos would be physically impossible. It’s also metrically a bit of a challenge, as this countermelody sounds like it is “on the beat,” but for the performer it is decidedly off the beat, all while trying to maintain a steady tempo with the metronomic Synchronic echoes. Eventually, this countermelody emerges to take the stage by itself, seemingly unscathed by its initial setting; formally, this emergence essentially wraps the piece up, and is followed by a restatement of the opening chorale.
Ok, that’s the best I can do trying to remember what this one was all about, at least in the making.
Here is the score for Shambolic, along with the bitKlavier gallery if you’d like to give it a try (of course, you’ll need bitKlavier as well!):
And here is Cristina Altamura performing Shambolic: