This is my last music-related article for 2024. I wish everyone a peaceful and prosperous new year. May the inner and outer turbulence experienced by 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 composition is just one of many modalities of creative musical expression, a form of story telling without words.
In this short piece, I have tried to convey the studied lightness, and 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 of the music being drawn from the 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?
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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.
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