Tallboy
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Some years ago I was co-teaching a songwriting class (with Chris Douthitt, who has also written a piece for the bitKlavier Commissions, as it happens), and we spent a bit of time pulling apart the song “Baltimore,” by Gabriel Kahane:
What a great song. The big leaps, the repeated notes, 2-voice contrary motion, all set the stage for some wonderful storytelling. My own—Tallboy—piece begins with something clearly indebted to “Baltimore,” and then goes on its own voyage; here’s Adam Sliwinski in a wonderful performance of the piece:
Prelude #7, Tallboy, performed by Adam Sliwinski
This piece actually works great on the regular old piano; the only bitKlavier-specific aspect to it is that I use spring-tuning (also this), which binds the tuning of all the sounding pitches together, and, in this case, takes on a subtle, sometimes slowly vibrating quality. This was directly inspired by the Kahane; about 1-minute into “Baltimore,” on the sustained chords, we hear a slow vibrato in the piano, presumably some kind of audio processing. The spring-tuning in Tallboy is different, but still puts the instrument on a kind of undulating, uncertain ground that I love. Like I said, however, this one also works fine on the regular old piano, if you are interested in trying it there.
Unrelated, but in this songwriting class we had a super talented student, Anson Jones (now out there doing her thing), and while I can’t remember the specifics, at one point in the class she brought in a scrap of music that had the coolest back-beats ever, where a lopsided 7/8 meter was punctuated by an evenly spaced emphasis on its weak-beats. Um, what? Well, here’s how that idea plays out in Tallboy:
This (to me anyhow) feels uneven, like a 4-beat measure with two medium beats followed by two long beats. The left-hand weak-beats, however, are evenly spaced, with seven 16th-notes separating their attacks, so there is a slower, even stratum layered below a more rapid moving, uneven stratum. I can’t remember if that’s exactly what Anson had brought in, metrically, but it was similar, and I just love how it invites us to listen and feel the music in different ways. You can hear this starting at about 1:15 in Adam’s recording above.
Eventually, those even weak-beats becomes the basis for an even 4/4 meter:
…around two minutes in to Adam’s recording.
Tallboy (along with a couple other of the preludes) became the starting point for a trio (bitKlavier, violin, cello) I wrote a few years ago, for the wonderful trio Longleash. I’ll revisit this in future posts about the other preludes, but Tallboy begins the trio:
Of course, as with the prelude, this movement can be played with conventional piano as well.
Ok, I’ll leave it at that. Here’s the score, and the bitKlavier gallery, for the solo version, if you’d like to try this out yourself:
The score and materials for the trio version can be found here.