se relire contre le piano-jouet
Evan Johnson
About this work:
Commissioned by the Royaumont Foundation.
se relire contre le piano-jouet was originally conceived as a part of a music theatre collaboration with director Richard Brunel. The concert version is identical to the theatrical music except that one movement has been removed and one unusually lengthy inter-movement pause shortened.
In any case, more restrictive than the theatrical association, compositionally speaking, was the instrumentation: a set of four toy pianos, two chromatic and two diatonic, belonging to Isabel Ettenauer. Along with its bizarre sound, out-of-tune and noisy, and its extremely limited pitch space, the toy piano brings with it a host of quasi-semantic associations – innocence and the loss thereof, youth and its opposite, naïveté and its opposite – which I resolved to leave to their own devices, accepting their affective influences as beyond my control and outside my sphere of interest. I wrote, then, “against the toy piano” (in the words of the title), seeking to externalize its restrictions in an ultimately destructive and futile rhetoric without recourse to their traditional redeeming affects. The intrusive noise of the instruments’ action, for example, is a key component of the work’s sound, to the extent that the almost overwhelming amount of detail notated in the score is not infrequently submerged by the shortcomings – that is to say, the features – of the instruments. And what on a well-tempered piano would be simple intervals – the octave, the fourth – are at key points lingered over and exposed in their detuned messiness.
The score bears a dedication to Isabel Ettenauer; this concert version is also dedicated to the memory of Fausto Romitelli.
Year composed: 2003
Duration: 00:11:00
Ensemble type: Keyboard:Unknown
Instrumentation: 4 Other Keyboard Instrument(s)
Instrumentation notes: Four toy pianos, one player