Us Alone, at Occupy the Pianos

Photo by Nick Rutter.

On April 20th, at St. John's Smith Square, I'll be performing my piece Us Alone on Sound Icon, with Ben Smith (also on Sound Icon) and Zoe Martlew (on cello). We'll also be performing Horatiu Radulescu's remarkable Intimate Rituals, a piece to which my work is greatly indebted, and some improvisations in which we experiment with the Sound Icons in unusual ways. 

A 'Sound Icon' is a grand piano turned on its side, stripped of its innards and bowed using nylon. You can see one on the right; the nylon threads have to pinned all around the frame with coloured electrical tape so you don't lose their whispy ends. They produce a remarkable, sitar-like sound, punctuated with an occasional 'ping', as the nylon threads snap under the pressure of playing. There's a little, low-quality video of me doing this below.

Both Radulescu's piece and mine use the harmonic series as a starting point for harmony. The harmonic series is the collection of notes that arise when you cut a string in half, doubling the frequency each time. These notes arise naturally in all musical sound, but are quite different from the tuning system we typically use.

Where Radulescu's work uses the harmonic series as an object in and of itself, investigating it as source of texture and melody, my work tries to marshal it into more traditional harmonies. Using the harmonic series to construct traditional major and minor chords – and chords somehow halfway in between – creates a strange tension, as the traditional impetus of the harmony never quite falls where your ears expect. The piece is ends up dwelling on the failure of sound – on chords half formed, notes half sounded, nylon threads broken.

​If you're interested in having a listen, then come along at 2pm on Friday 20th April. It's free, but you can see the details here.