During a five-year slough of depression Conlon Nancarrow occupied himself by doggedly copying out his Studies for player piano in conventional music notation. He did this not only to secure copyright for his compositions, but in the hope that his son would one day grow up to understand that he hadn’t wasted his life.
I don’t have any kids but I am staying with my parents for the first time in years, so maybe this is why I am passing the time in the heat and the damp of the Queensland countryside by writing some of my pieces out as musician-readable scores. This may have not been such a good idea. Luckily I don’t have to prove anything to my parents, but we’ve been looking through old photographs and stuff which is still embarrassing, albeit for slightly different reasons than in the past. So much of what I’m doing now seems so similar to kid’s play way back then.
Anyway, I’ve prepared four pieces from Redundens so far, all for piano. The Redundens web page is still a bit of a mess, but at least it’s now a bit more up to date.
The series of works collectively titled Redundens was begun in 2001. All the pieces take Arnold Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Piano, Op.11 as their starting point: only the top line in Schoenberg’s pieces is retained as an unaccompanied melody. Each set of pieces uses a different method of encoding this melody; by pitch, register, timbre, duration, dynamics, or other means. Redundens 1b keeps each pitch class in the same register and duration throughout the piece, determined by the nature of their initial appearances in the original. Dynamics are unspecified.
Redundens 4 plays the sequence of pitch-classes with durations and rhythms removed, always making the smallest leap possible from one note to the next.
Redundens 7 plays the sequence of pitch-classes with durations and rhythms removed, always making the smallest leap possible from one note to the next. The resulting melody is then split between two voices, alternating from one note to the next. The second voice is then shifted back one beat to produce a series of intervals. Unisons are played as a single note at half duration.
Redundens 11a removes durations and rhythmic articulation but preserves pitch class. Each pitch class is progressively transposed upwards by an octave to produce series of rising intervals, in repeatedly ascending figures of four notes each.
