Augmented Realities

6/25/2020

Augmented Realities

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Can it be true that my last blog was 4 years ago?

If so, another one is long overdue. Strap yerself in...

This time I’m writing a few words ahead of my next performance, which is this coming Sunday – ‘Pianoscapes’ on June 28th. I’ll be explaining some of the reasons for the musical choices, but there are going to be various threads to this, and a number of inescapable but necessary diversions. Bear with me…

I’m starting with this: it seems to me that, as we emerge from ‘Lockdown’ into some kind of ‘post-Lockdown middle ground’, that the unresolved sounds of the whole-tone scale, and the ‘augmented’ tonalities that it generates, seem to be coming up as the ‘Music of the Lockdown’ in my world… That seems very appropriate: time is suspended; there’s no obvious direction; everything (except for nature) is in a kind of stasis… this scale, and the chords that it generates, encapsulate this ennui very well….

In the first ‘Zoom’ lessons with my student George – back at the end of March and into early April - we’d been working on, amongst other things, Liszt’s ‘Consolation no.3’. Hot on the heels of this, and to round out his knowledge of Liszt (ie. not just as the virtuoso composer and performer of the High Romantic Age, but also, in his old age, as a pioneer of ‘expanding tonality’ at the end of the 19thC), I had George have a look at ‘Nuages Gris’. This short piece of music, composed in 1881, dwells almost exclusively in the strange land of ‘augmented tonality’ – as do most of Liszt’s late pieces – and it’s a murky place of unresolved and mysterious chord progressions, leading the listener into existential places…
Off the back of this – and as a way of connecting all of this back to jazz (we’d also been looking at Jacob Collier’s arrangements, and extended harmonies of various kinds) - I set him the task of composing a piece for piano that only uses augmented chords and sus4 chords, to stretch his ears and cultivate a feeling for unresolving harmony…

Then, as we moved out of April and through May – out of nowhere? – came an online performance of ‘Vexations’ [Erik Satie, composed 1893]. I can’t remember how it happened but I became aware of composer and old-time-COMA (Contemporary Music For Amateurs)-buddy Kathy Hinde organising a performance of this infamous piece: a short 42-beat sequence of augmented triads, to be repeated 840 times… ‘very slowly’… something that can take anywhere between 15 and 20+ hours.
This realisation of ‘Vexations’ was comprised of 840 different ‘single passes’ at the 42-beat sequence, recorded by different musicians and submitted to Kathy; these were then rotated using a piece of randomising software until 840 iterations had passed – which did take over 24 hours (I think)...

I’d taken part in a live realisation of this piece a few years back (2016), as part of the Cheltenham Music Festival. I’d even clocked in an appearance on BBC’s Midlands Today as a result (I was the performer that started the proceedings). It’s a tricky one to prepare for: you can work on the music itself (the score is written using double flats and double sharps to make it deliberately tricky to play), but perhaps you’re unlikely to play it over and over ‘in preparation’ for the ordeal that you will be called upon to undertake... My ‘Vexations Baptism of Fire’ was actually OK: I think I did about 20-25 mins on this occasion, and very much enjoyed the experience… the music has the effect of ‘warping time’ and really focusing the mind.

But as May morphed into June - in fact, on May 31st - Kathy emailed me to let me know that a live solo performance of ‘Vexations’ had begun in Berlin that very day, at 2pm UK time. Pianist Igor Levit (I’d been aware of his recent album ‘Life’) was well underway when I tuned it c.6pm and became immediately fascinated by this (rather voyeuristic) process of self-immolation. His ‘performance’ was to become increasingly nightmarish to witness as his 15-hour ordeal wore on…. the awful reality of the repetition of days, the isolation, the prison that lockdown has the potential to be, was writ large and brutal in this epic struggle of mental strength, perseverance, physical stamina and sheer bloody-mindedness (the link below is an 11-hour extract from the 15-hour performance)...

But – I haven’t yet explained these ‘augmented’ tonalities.

Take a major triad and raise the fifth degree of the scale a semitone; you then have a symmetrical structure: 2 major thirds stacked up (1-3, 3-#5). It’s a chord that’s on the way to somewhere – you could call it a ‘passing chord’, which would usually connect 2 other chords – but when it’s used as a chord on its own terms, the resulting music hangs ambiguously and doesn’t resolve.

Or pick a note, any note, and ascend in intervals of a whole tone. You’ll be playing a whole tone scale, designated by Olivier Messiaen as no. 1 of the ‘modes of limited transposition’ (so-called because you can only transpose it once: up a semitone. If you transpose it again, the resulting set of notes are the same as the original set). This scale is familiar to most people as the musical cliché in a film context, suggesting water or a dream sequence (and usually played on a harp!).

If you build triads out of a whole tone scale, you generate a sequence of augmented triads.

The scale and its chords have appeared in the music of Debussy and other Impressionist composers – it turns out that the current Grade 8 piano syllabus that George is working on contains ‘Voiles’ from Debussy’s 1st Book of Preludes – one of the quintessential wholetone pieces in the piano repertoire.

And George also wanted to work on some music by Stevie Wonder – initially, ‘Isn’t She Lovely’, which has become a bit of a jazz-standard-showcase; but, it then occurred to me, ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’ begins with a rising set of augmented chords…

And then there’s Keith Emerson. A cornerstone of his musical fingerprint is the use of quartal harmonies, sus4-type shapes, and augmented tonalities. Side 2 of the 1st Emerson, Lake & Palmer album opens with 'The Three Fates’, a fiendish piece which is almost exclusively built from these elements, and one that I've been working on since I found a transcription of it at least 10 years ago - and, (co?)incidentally, had chosen to start chipping away at again, just before Lockdown began... So back it came, back onto the music stand during May and June.

So, at last, we get there. I’m going to start Sunday’s concert with 'The Three Fates', music that has accompanied me from pretty much the beginning of my musical odyssey (my brother was given the ELP album for his 12th birthday, when I was an impressionable 8 year-old, and it became an obsession for me from that point). 'The Three Fates' themselves come from Ancient Greek mythology: Clotho ("spinner"), Lachesis ("allotter") and Atropos ("the unturnable", a metaphor for death). They controlled the mother thread of life of every mortal from birth to death. The music is at turns dramatic, rhapsodic, and frantic: 'Clotho', for organ, alternates forte passages based on gritty suspended chords, with florid RH episodes on the flute stop; 'Lachesis' is a relentless augmented-tonality solo piano drama; 'Atropos' is a wholetone-based driving ostinato slap-in-the face, ending with the music dragging us down into Hades itself.

As is always the case, a 'Piansoscapes' programme evolves in tandem with events that occur leading up to it - sometimes as late as on the day itself. This month there have been two deaths that have impinged on the evolution of the programme: firstly - and continuing the 'augmented tonality' theme - I'll be playing music by another Keith - Keith Tippett, another musical hero (and a Bristolian!) who passed away this month. Improvisation is at the core of his life's work: so finding a specific 'piece' to 'realise' isn't straightforward. fortunately, as part of an 'online memoriam' my neighbour Mr Fripp posted a song by his good lady, Toyah, which features a guest appearance by Mr Tippett: he’s playing a 2-chord vamp which uses minor-major7 chords – structures which contain within them our old (or new?) friend, the augmented triad… So I’ll be including that piece too, or at least an improvisation on Keith’s bit of it, as a homage to the man himself .

[incidentally – there’s a petition to have the Colston Hall in Bristol renamed as The Keith Tippett Centre’ – sign the petition here - www.change.org/p/bristolmusictrust-org-uk-renaming-colston-hall-to-the-keith-tippett-hall-centre?recruiter=22332670&utm]

And then there’s the music of Mr Fripp himself – in particular, ‘Fracture’ – another piece built almost exclusively from augmented chords and whole-tone materials. However, working this up will take time: notoriously ‘impossible to play’ (on guitar, at any rate!), I’ll be trying to get this ready for July’s 'Pianoscapes’… watch this space…!

CURIOSER & CURIOSER...

Leaving augmented tonalities aside now... phew… the other pieces I’ll be playing include a homage to actor Ian Holm (the other personage who is lately deceased) – he starred in ‘Chariots of Fire' (1981), and I had the soundtrack album (by Vangelis) as a kid – I particularly like ‘Abrahams Theme’, in C#m. Curiously, The Three Fates ends in a Db major tonality, so I feel a tidy segue coming on… and equally curiously, the Keith Tippett vamp uses the same 2 chord movement as Abraham’s Theme (tonic chord to flattened submediant), so another segue is possible… Serendipity? You couldn’t make this stuff up…

Other elements of the programme will be drawn from the array of pieces that I’m currently working on – not least the long-awaited Prelude 1 op 16 by Scriabin (yay!). The Elton John cover (wait and see) is a request – ‘keeping the customers satisfied’, as Paul Simon might have said… and the Meade Lux Lewis blues is a transcription I made back in the early 1990s. Here's the original -

There will be a couple of other pieces too, and some improvisation... you'll have to come along to find out...

Incidentally, if you want to hear me playing a single pass of 'Vexations' - the music of the Lockdown - then tune in for the next ‘Lockdown Vexations’, which is broadcast on 12th July. Submissions are invited, if you feel moved to have a go – see satievexations.art . After all this, I’ll definitely be encouraging George to get involved!