Assumed audience: People interested in contemporary classical music. Perhaps extra interesting if you are curious about the compositional process.
I am delighted to announce that you can listen to a new piece of music I wrote: The Desert, for solo piano:
“The Desert” took just me under 48 hours. I have never done anything quite like it before.
On Sunday, February 18, I had the idea for a simple piece for the Christian fast of Lent, recalling the story of Jesus’ spending 40 days and nights fasting in the desert. I sat down at the piano and found the core musical motif — a descending tritone, followed by a resolution by a further half step down, very spread out in time. The basic effect is lonely: a great sonic emptiness due to the long-lingering notes, and not exactly a traditional tonal move, but beautiful.
The next evening (Monday, February 19), I wrote the rest of it. The core musical idea was incredibly simple: 40 key strokes for the 40 days of Jesus’ fasting in the desert, and thus for the 40 days of Lent. I say “key strokes” rather than “notes” because there are a handful of two-note chords in the piece — but only a handful. My process was a simple cycle of playing, listening to the effect, and when I was satisfied with both the notes and their duration, entered them into Dorico. Throughout, I kept circling back to the tritone, though in a few cases switching to a rising rather than falling tritone, but also pulled in a variety of other similarly open-and-empty-sounding motions. This cycle of playing-and-listening was, in a way that is rather unusual for how I have historically worked, rather meditative. It reminded me — and so I began expressly drawing on — the “holy minimalism” of composers like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. This is not directly like anything either of them wrote, but it is in much the same vein. With that experience in mind, I added a playing instruction to the finished score:
Played as though listening for what the next note should be.
I effectively wrote this in “free time”: no time signature. I gave each note the number of beats it sounded like it should have. Tempo-wise, I simply chose a fairly slow tempo by feel when I started. There is, quite intentionally, little sense of rhythmic structure to the piece. It moves forward, but in the way that 40 days in the wilderness might pass: never quickly, but sometimes more quickly and sometimes less. Most of the notes are quarter notes, sometimes staccato and sometimes not. Occasionally they stretch out to be as long as held whole notes. The sustain pedal is held throughout save for one series of moving lines near the middle of the piece. The interaction between pedal and how long you hold the keys is a subtle effect on a piano, but a real one: because the while the hammers are no longer hitting the keys, neither do you hear the keys come back to their resting position.1 I went back and forth while writing whether to notate in free time or measured time, and I actually ultimately produced both versions of the score. The measured version — with its constant shifting around 10/4, 8/4, 9/4, etc. — is far easier to perform because the counts between notes are very obvious. At the same time, the free time version does a better job of indicating the feel of the piece.
see both versions of the score
(Just so we are extra clear, since I cannot stop you from downloading these PDFs: you are free to play the piece for friends and family yourself. You are not free to perform it for money, or record it without sub-licensing it from me. However, if you would like to do either, get in touch and I will be happy to work something out!)
If you’d like a deep dive on it musically, I have you covered there:
I got up the next morning basic (Tuesday, February 20), and after helping my wife get our girls out the door, set up a little home recording “studio”. Scare quotes because the studio consisted of a microphone at our upright piano in our living room. I ran the microphone straight into my Mac, set up Logic Pro with a tempo map produced by exporting a MIDI file from Dorico. Then I did four or five takes, until I had one I was satisfied with.2 That afternoon, I hopped on a call with my friend and former colleague Bryan Levay, and he showed me how he approaches mixing and mastering. With a finished recording in hand, I uploaded it for distribution.
And here we are today: with the music live in the world. Please listen to it and if you like it, share it with others who might as well — and I would love to hear from you as well!
Notes
There are also very subtle differences in the actual sound of the notes, due to the different placement of the hammers within the body of the piano and the tiny changes that produces in the resonant chamber that is a piano body. But those are very subtle. ↩︎
I tried using Logic’s support for takes, but it ended up not working very well for this kind of very ambient music — at least, with my skill level in both playing and recording. ↩︎