aus: Drei Klavierstücke

Piano: Ermis Theodorakis

Mario Cosimo, Klavierstück Nr. 2

Jan Steele Alto Saxophone
Jonathan Parry Piano

Composed by Jonathan Parry in March 2023 and Recorded at Jan Steele's home in July 2023

THE OLD TOWN (for Alto Saxophone and Piano)

Psychiatry, and the world at large, operate on the assumption that the “healthy” and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. Depression, “fear of life,” refusal of nourishment, and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter. Often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of antibiological tendencies. It is not the soul being sick, but its protection failing. ~ Peter Wessel Zappfe

Album leaf from a nocturnal journal

The most basic rhythmic transformation consists in subdividing a single unit of time into two equal halves.  Repeating this operation produces an infinitude of patterns of which this piece might be considered a partial catalog.  The tempo is chosen so that the beginning sounds like some sort of virtuoso drumming (but these are my own computer generated sounds, and no sampling was involved), yet gradually, as the patterns grow more complex, execution would require superhuman ability and the result verges on the biological.  The catalog has its own emergent shape, so there is rhythmic interest too on larger time scales.

Halve and Whole

For an incredibly special person, a unicorn, really, lol - whom I am deeply privileged to call my friend. 

Evie

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

That's a lonely road you're trav'lin'

Michael Finnissy - O, schöner Mai performed 17 jun 2025

HEIWA TO MEIYO for harpsichord: in memoriam Toru Katayama (1927-2025)

HEIWA TO MEIYO for harpsichord—in memoriam Toru Katayama (1927-2025)

BIRTHDAY PARADE No. 2 by Gary Lloyd Noland (June 27th, 2025)

BIRTHDAY PARADE NO. 2

Richard Glover: Logical Harmonies

“Abiya” is a portmanteau word coined by the early kabbalist Isaac of Acre from the initial letters of the Hebrew names for the four worlds (emanation, creation, formation and making), which, in Kabbala, constitute the entirety of creation.  At the start of my piece, the hierarchical organisation of the four worlds is mirrored by a texture in which the same material (groups of widespread chords) is stated on four levels.  Each level gradually moves away from the opening texture, the outer ones in in a straightforward goal-oriented fashion, while the inner parts develop in a more freely associative, tangential way.

At four points there is an attempt to paper over the cracks created as a result of the disengagement of the four levels of activity in the form of a type of musical red herring.  The discourse is made to act as accompaniment to a florid type of music, different form anything heard thus far.  This music is both “non-pianistic” and anachronistic, evoking a distorted memory of monodic vocal music from the time of Monteverdi.

In the fifth and final section all four strands are drawn together again.  Each now consists of a melodic line complete with its own accompaniment – a distant echo of the sound of the huge iron-keyed gamelan of Tenganan in the east of Bali. This music, too, is subjected to variative procedures.  The four highly complex lines which result for these are both too strenuous for the material to bear and extremely tricky for the performer to articulate, and the work finally disintegrates into silence.

Abiya was written in 1995 and commissioned by Ian Pace (who gave the first performance on 28th March 1997 at Conway Hall, London) with funds made available by the Holst foundation.  It is dedicated with gratitude and affection to Ian Pace and Henrietta Brougham.   

The work has the distinction of being mentioned in Blair Babylon’s 2015 romantic novel “Every Breath You Take”.


Abiya

Composer, mathematician, visual artist. 
Seeks collaboration with performers and choreographers.

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Halve and Whole

David Victor Feldman

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