Taking on the Piano Trio

Eric Skytterholm Egan

Taking on the Piano Trio

As part of New Music Dublin, which takes place at the National Concert Hall from 1 to 3 March 2013, a number of composers are participating in a workshop with the Fidelio Trio, a piano trio comprising Darragh Morgan (violin), Robin Michael (cello) and Mary Dullea (piano). The workshop will feature five new works for the trio, and the composers will be facilitated by the Austrian composer Johannes Maria Straud, whose own new piano trio will be premiered at the festival.

The Journal of Music asked the composers involved for some of their thoughts on the piano trio — a form that was first popularised in the era of Haydn and Mozart — as well as their individual approaches to a new work for the Fidelio Trio.

Amanda Feery

Ultimately, what attracts me to writing for the piano trio is that it sits in a middle-ground of creative freedom that myself, and possibly other composers, are most comfortable with — we are not given too much, the possibilities are not endless. We are limited to three players, but within those limitations there is a wonderful sonic scope. Percussive, plaintive, sheer, reverberant, hierarchical, equal — there’s a wide spectrum within the limitations of what three players can do. I’m also interested in the potential performance spaces the piano trio can inhabit, and how these spaces can effect compositional decisions. I love the idea that the medium can be lifted from the concert hall to the corner of an intimate club, or the ‘good room’ of a home.

The Fauré and Ravel trios are beautifully crafted for the medium and masterful in their scope, and I return to them regularly. I was lucky to hear a live performance of Feldman’s Trio #2 years ago. I appreciate that work for it’s very finite tapestry of textures — never extreme in their contrasts. It’s the beauty of the overall texture that Feldman works with, offering only the slightest pantone digression of shade as the piece progresses. While I was writing To Be All Things [Feery’s new piece for the Fidelio Trio], I listened to Fruity Pebbles, by American composer Marc Mellits. I love this piece for Mellits’s treatment of the piano trio as a sort of hybrid, meta instrument! He creates a resonant, hardanger-like sympathetic string sound, merged with the body of the piano that’s transformed into a cavernous reverb tank.

To Be All Things, is an instrumental ‘sister’ work to a vocal work I’m composing based on the diary entries of the ill-fated amateur sailor, Donald Crowhurst. I’ve been studying old sea tunes; songs of work, sorrow, longing — their melodic contours and their harmonies. I wanted to embed a ‘tune’ in this trio, but a tune I composed myself. I like the idea of a new tune that comes into existence but has an uncanny air of uncertainty to where it originated, simulating the idea that it’s half-remembered or partially-forgotten.

Seán Clancy

I was really attracted to the medium of the piano trio firstly, because we have two groups of instruments which are diametrically opposed to each other. On the one hand, there is the piano whose nature is to attack and decay and on the other, there are the string instruments whose nature (for the most part) is to sustain. Reconciling this timbreal dialectic interests me greatly and is something I have tried to do with this Fidelio Trio piece. Secondly, having worked with Darragh, Mary and Robin in various different guises in the past and having heard them perform on a number of occasions, I have the utmost admiration and respect for their musicianship and their dedication to new music. Thus, I really wanted to write something new for them.

There are a lot of piano trios I like, all for various different reasons. I really like Gerald Barry’s In the Asylum because it displays brilliantly how incredible Gerald is at playing with material and how he can transform the most mundane things (mishearing what someone had said in this case) into something extraordinary. Joe Cutler’s Archie is a fine example of addressing the timbreal issues I mentioned above in a tripartite structure. Ed Bennett’s For Marcel Dzama is such a visceral piece and is unrelenting from beginning to end. It is a great experience just to let the sounds wash over you. Donnacha Dennehy’s Bulb is a supreme example of how one may marry spectral and minimalist elements and I was blown away by it the first time I heard it — it had answered a lot of questions I had myself been asking at the time. Sciarrino’s trios are great because at once they sound utterly unlike a piano trio whilst at the same time sounding completely like a piano trio. However, Morton Feldman’s Trio is undoubtedly the masterpiece of the medium. Not only does it sound incredibly beautiful, but it also addresses totally and unconditionally the very nature of the piano trio. I also like Mozart’s piano trios!

As with all of the music I have written over the past four years, this piece is an intervention on pre-existing material. In this case, it is the painting Red, Blue, Orange by Mark Rothko. This painting quite recently became quite significant in my life and as a result I wanted to transform the experience of it from something visual in space to something aural in time. I used the painting to determine the structure (bipartite) and the dimensions to determine the overall length and how each section would relate to the other. I also used the colours to determine the character and tonality of the material. Approaching the piece this way allowed me to address the more fundamental ‘musical’ questions that I alluded to above. To this end, one section focuses on the sustained nature of the trio whilst the other section hones in on the attacking and decaying nature of the trio. By so doing (and in a very short space of time) I hope to have somewhat meagerly addressed both the nature of the piano trio and artistic intervention whilst at the same time creating something that might be pleasurable to listen to!

Piaras Hoban

I don’t feel that I’m any more or less attracted to the piano trio than I am to any other combination of instruments. Whatever the medium I find myself working in, I try to find again — for myself — some special quality it might hold within itself; nothing necessarily new or novel, as it seems difficult to speak of sound or experience in these terms. Likewise, I think the formation will also draw things out of me… perhaps it is (to borrow a phrase) ‘a kind of uneasy collaboration’.

Two pieces I listen to very often are in fact piano trios, both are the composers’ second piano trio and both always strike me as really strange music. Schubert’s late trio No. 2 is one, a work that first introduced me to the sublime and uncanny world of Schubert. I’m not a purist and still don’t know if I prefer the piece itself or the dazzling scene built around it in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. The second work is Salvatore Sciarrino’s Trio No. 2, which I first encountered as a student at Queen’s University. During my second year in Belfast the ensemble recherche gave two concerts of — what was to me at the time — revelatory music. I was lucky enough to watch Sciarrino’s piano trio from about five feet away and I think it changed my head forever. It was like hearing these instruments washed clean; it was music without telos, totally disorientating, shattering and thrilling.

A beautiful quote from Timothy Morton provided a kind of center for my thinking during the short process of writing this little bit of music [for the Fidelio Trio], Between what we take to be things there exist other things, as if the universe were jammed with entities like clowns in a crowded Expressionist painting. An abyss of things that emanates from them, not a yawning void that threatens to engulf them, but a sunlit nothingness filled with dust that seems to spray out of them like dry mist sparkling with firefly swarms. For me, the activity of composing moves all the time between listening, improvising, generating, dreaming, notating, etc. I’m seeking a working method that allows these different parts of composing to ripple out against one another, collide and share secrets; as opposed to making an orderly procession from one stage to the next — as if I were eating a tube of Pringles or chain smoking cigarettes. So I leave gaps everywhere, I think, play, dream; maybe things emanate and maybe they don’t.

Eric Skytterholm Egan

Actually I think there is a great shortage of good piano trios in the contemporary repertoire. Perhaps this is due to the very traditional connotations composers have to the instrumentation. However, saying that, there is no shortage of composers writing contemporary music for the string quartet, an instrumentation with an equally strong historical tradition (Brian Ferneyhough has written six quartets, Helmut Lachenmann has written three, etc.). The traditional connotations are probably one of the things that attract me to the piano trio as a format. Personally I like playing with the listener’s expectations. When an audience member sees a piano trio on stage, they automatically see this instrumentation in light of a series of pieces that they are already aquatinted with. Typically this will include pieces by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Brahms.

My music is very far removed from these composers or indeed from a lot of mainstream contemporary music. I like working with sound worlds that combine pitches and noise. Moreover the pitch material I work with these days is usually of a slightly unpredictable nature; I often use techniques that, although they follow a clearly outlined pattern, will result in a slightly different result every time. This will primarily be down to the fact that these techniques are unstable or impossible to produce completely accurately. The result is that every performance will be slightly different. We live in a world where the technical ability of musicians far surpasses anything we have ever experienced in the past. I like to explore this notion by providing musicians with pieces where, no matter how much they rehearse, they will be unable to achieve the same result every time. The idea is to provide the listener with the opportunity to hear the ‘human’ side of virtuosity.

The inspiration for my piece came from a series of quotations from Ulysses: ‘Quiet reflections upon the course of the day: a cleaner sensation when awakening after a fresher sleep since matutinal noises, premonitions and perturbations…’ and ‘What reflections occupied his mind during the process of revision of the inverted volumes?’ The text provided me with the idea of taking a few small musical ideas that I have used in previous pieces and letting them speak on their own terms; I took material that I have only ever used in passing and made these the foundations of a piece, which is entitled Reflections (1st). The material is quite quirky, in that it combines some rarely used techniques on each of the instruments (brushing the strings with the hand, vibrating the fingers between the strings/keys, and using the piano pedal as a percussive instrument) into a continuously moving, yet at the same time somewhat static musical landscape. This combines the occasional, slightly unpredictable, pitch with the noises that lie around, underneath, and within these notes themselves.

Ruadhrí Mannion

The dimensions of sound available to the violin and cello are seemingly endless, and for me it’s a captivating prospect to place those voices within the spaces available to the piano. Since I was a child I found the resonant qualities of the piano and its pedals almost addictive, and working with the transformation of string timbres within those resonating spaces allows you to alter the trajectory of the sound over time.

The closing moments of [Jonathan Harvey’s piano trio] fascinate me: the clear characterisation of each voice, their fragmentation within the ensemble and within themselves — and then the more frantic elements begins to unwind into short but slow glissandi, relaxed repetitions and growling utterances from the bass of the piano. It affects me quite physically when I listen closely; it reminds me to breathe.

The inspiration for the process [in Chamber Music, Mannion’s new work] came from one of Alvin Lucier’s best-known works, I am sitting in a room. In this piece Lucier records himself speaking a text into a room and then plays back the recording of his voice into the space. The process of playing back the new re-recording into the room is repeated until all the discernible qualities of the original text are lost, but are gradually replaced with the resonant frequencies of the room. The text becomes one with the harmony of the room.

I wanted to reverse this process by gradually bringing the original material to the fore. Two short phrases of violin and cello, pre-recorded by me, have undergone the same process and I labelled each of the recordings as being in different rooms, or chambers. In the performance, the recorded material is played back into the body of the piano with the sustain pedals depressed to allow the material to echo inside the body of the piano while the violin and cello mirror aspects and fragments of the original recording, like debris in the foreground. In this shortened version the recorded sound traverses Chambers 20 to 1 in each of the two sections. In the first section there are intersecting resonant pauses explored by the ensemble, and the second section unfolds with a long sustained crescendo, the music becoming less ethereal and more earthy.

newmusicdublin.ie

Published on 27 February 2013

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