Thank you for visiting my channel and taking an interest in my work. This is my final post for 2024.  I wish everyone a prosperous and peaceful new year. May the inner and outer turbulence for so many subside …

Backstory

La Patineuse à Glace is an original composition, a contemplative waltz (with sweeping moments) for solo piano: another example of program music, instrumental music intended to carry some kind of extra-musical meaning or ‘program’ of ideas. This approach to musical composition is just one of the many modalities of creative expression, a form of story telling but without words.

In this short piece, I have tried to convey the studied lightness, and the gentle exhilarating joy I associate with my own memories of figure skating on ice in all sorts of indoor and outdoor settings. In terms of style, not speed skating, or artistic roller skating, or freestyle slalom skating, or jam skating, although you may identify a passage or two of synchronised skating in this work.

The preps, the glides, the builds and (artistic) phrasing, the balance, the turns, the pivots and most importantly, the fluidity, all designed to (hopefully) coalesce here into a single coherent narrative in the space of two and a half minutes!  So much to squeeze in, so little time … Anyway, I persevere with my current attempts at original composition, drawing inspiration from the recent words of Australia’s two most famous young violinist-YouTubers Brett Yang and Eddy Chen …

Composition is a practice, a practice of creation

Devotion, tradition, beyond the whims of fashion

[B²TSM*- Bach @twosetviolin]

As for the echoes of culture embedded in this work? Other than the general tonality being drawn from twelve tone equal temperament [12-ET] it is difficult to say. So, over to you. What do you think are the inter-cultural and other echoes  in this intermedia composition?

__________________________________

Notes

*B²TSM is an acronym for the first letters of the names of five prominent classical music composers: Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Mozart.

End of transcript.