Name: To see the lines beneath me... (for solo piano) by Melissa Rankin
Duration: 6 min 41 s
Description: Premiered by Rolf Hind in Stevenson Hall, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland on 25th November 2022.

love the unique way you put so much into your work with so few notes brilliant

James Creed: piano and comically-small harmonica

From 'Piano Studies 1–6', available pay-what-you-can via Bandcamp

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The scores in this little collection are for pianists and pianos. They could be “performance pieces,” but principally they are nice things to do or nice ways to think about things that we’re doing already. They are more like letters, in a sense: though they can and perhaps will be performed publicly, they address themselves to the pianist sitting at the piano whether others are there to observe or not. For these recordings the letters were addressed to myself.

They all, in some way, follow on from something Fernando and Mira said in the reading/study group we set up with friends – that part of being a pianist is being prepared to play any piano in the world (I prefer “every” to “any”) and I just think that’s wonderful.

Thanks to: Fernando Yada Rodrigues; Mira Benjamin; Katie Grout; Anne Han; Konstantinos Glynos; Khabat Abas; Jess Porter-Langson; Jay Keys; Clare Spollen; Luis John; Claudia Creed.

Thanks also to: the piano at home; the piano at Callum, Jenny, Sylvia and Pete’s; the piano at Gwyneth’s; the piano in room 167 at Goldsmiths; the piano at Pembroke House.

Piano Study 5 (2021)

Mag (24/7/22)

Performed by Huw Morgan at St Thomas the Martyr, Bristol.

'Malum Opus' (translation: apple/disaster work) was written with the thought of a decaying apple in mind and my perceptions of decay, whether it be the withering wrinkles and crevices as the item falls apart, or the beautiful colours that appear in sprouting mould. The piece oscillates between consonance and microtonal dissonance, shifting the listener’s perceptions of the chords as they transition within these oscillations, gradually moving closer towards a microtonal decay and then eventual resolution as the apple becomes part of the earth.

Malum Opus, Performed by Huw Morgan, 14/05/2022, Bristol.

Premiered by Rolf Hind in Stevenson Hall, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland on 25th November 2022.

To see the lines beneath me... (for solo piano)

Some small harvest (dec. 2022)
for mixed quartet and tape
ded. to A.D
premiere recording (feb. 2023) by Collective LoveMusic

Some small harvest

By The Red Tent

Brooklyn mainstay SPF 50 recorded live in the Bad Room on 11.3.23. The opening set is journey from downtempo to chunkers featuring off-kilter rhythms, rolling basslines, offbeat house and kaleidoscopic techno.

You can listen to more of SPF 50 here - @professional_music

SPF 50 - Live At Good Room - 11.3.23

 [[tapedel] played & programmed customised Yamaha Disklavier Pro, Recorded To Nagra IVS 5"]

avril 14th, notes played backwards, not the audio.

Pushing my thumb through a plate

'Long pan requiem' is an open duration performance installation for six (or more) singers.

In many ways, the piece is a love letter to heterophony and the human voice. Split into two parts, ‘Long pan requiem’ is a setting of an alphabeticalised list of every syllable used in the ‘Introit’ of the Requiem Mass. Through simple ideas such as repetition, stasis and canon, the music functions like a sonic sculpture in an attempt to grind to a halt, or at other times totally freeze, the development of the music as time unfolds.

The singers are dispersed around a large, open, reverberant space, each facing a different angle rather than collectively directing their sound towards a single point; some face one another, others into walls or the corners of the space, or even outward and away from the rest of the ensemble. Each performer has an almost identical musical part, yet they sing independent of one another, slowly moving through their music at their own pace with each part governed by a unique set of repetitions and minuscule variations. 

The audience is free to walk around this constellation of choral sound, resulting in an ever shifting tapestry of individual voices in amongst the overall glow of the ensemble. This allows the listener to at times be up close an individual performer, with the idiosyncrasies and intricacies of that singer’s voice providing a particular perspective on the music, before moving off back into the crowd as the sound continues to cycle around itself and the space.

This recording is made up of three different audience member’s journeys through the installation, each of whom carried a small microphone to capture their route around the singers, in amongst the movement of people, the drafts coming in from outside, and the sounds of toddlers chasing one another.

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Many thanks to Foundation Royaumont for the opportunity to create this piece through their Voix Nouvelles programme, and to EXAUDI - Juliet Fraser, Lucy Goddard, Tom Williams, David de Winter, Simon Whiteley and Jimmy Holliday.

Long pan requiem

there are other mashups of this online but i did an edit to suit my taste.

Charli XCX - Unlock it X Alice Deejay - Better off Alone (RH edit)

I am a composer and sound artist based in Glasgow. My work focuses on ideas of intimacy, fragility, deep listening, sentimentality, and the manipulation of sound perception. :)

she/her

To see the lines beneath me... (for solo piano)

Melissa Rankin

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