Guest Composer: Daniel Liu, Clare College, University of Cambridge
The three recurring gestures in the piano part of Daniel Liu’s “machine.”
My name is Daniel Liu, I am a composer studying music at Cambridge. My most recent piece is a piano quartet, titled Miniatures for Piano Quartet (Memories of Tippett).
I had a composition lesson last year, where I showed my teacher something I’d stayed up to write the night before. It was only a few bars long, but it had taken so much of my time and effort – I deliberated endlessly on every note. More than that though, I had no idea how to continue the piece, since the passage was so self-contained and didn’t want to go anywhere. Needless to say, my teacher didn’t have too much to say about my “piece.” At the end of the 20 minutes (the lesson was supposed to be an hour), it was agreed that I should write something which sticks to a simple process, a short “musical machine.” I found this task stimulating, and within a few months, I had written a few such movements (the Miniatures are a compilation of these).
The first of Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet provided me with a precedent in tackling this brief. Throughout the movement, the two main parts of the texture, the violin melody and the cello accompaniment, repeat without variation a small chunk of material, like two wind up toys. This is the entire movement, nothing else happens.
Since the length of the repeated material is different in the two parts – the violin repeats every 23 quarter-notes, while the cello repeats every 7 – the piece as a whole never sounds exactly the same, because each time the tune starts again, the accompaniment is in a different place, and vice versa. Additionally, the 2nd violin part is irregular, further obscuring the repetition in the other parts.
Here is how one of my own machines works. It consists of a solo piano line, accompanied by sustained string chords. The piano part of this movement has three recurring gestures, each with their own harmonic and rhythmic characteristics. The first, let’s call it A, is an arpeggio upwards:
Gesture A
The second we’ll call B. It is a repeated high E:
Gesture B
And the third, C, is a modified snippet of Tippett’s 3rd Piano Sonata (hence the title):
Gesture C
I cycle through these three gestures in the following sequence, which goes through every possible permutation of ABC:
ABC BCA CAB ACB CBA BAC
As a result, the piece feels as if it is constantly circling around the same material, but never repeats itself exactly. Out of this arbitrary sequence though, I wanted to make phrases that breathe naturally. Since C ends with a long note, it sounds like the end of a phrase – so, I divided the above sequence into groups which end in C, like this:
ABC BC AC ABAC BC BABAC
and then freely altered each gesture until each group had the right momentum. This was done entirely intuitively, and here I ended up making some changes to the sequence – however, the general character of each gesture remains unchanged.
Daniel Liu, Miniatures for Piano Quartet (Memories of Tippett) (excerpt)
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