|
tract (1984-96) |
solo piano - 25'
Tract was originally conceived in 1984 as a complementary pair of compositions: Tract I was completed in 1989, commissioned by James Clapperton, and Tract II, commissioned by Ian Pace, was finished in the summer of 1996 and the complete Tract was first performed by him at the University of Wales, Bangor, in October that year.
The poetic concept or "situation" envisioned for the two works might be described as two attempts to play the same "piece" (a silence of one minute is interposed between the two parts). The pianist could be seen as a character on stage, whose attempts to articulate a coherent monologue are shaped and distorted by the multilayered workings (and malfunctioning) of his/her memory. There is an explicit parallel here with the works of such writers as Samuel Beckett and Robert Pinget - Beckett’s novel How it is, in fact, provides one angle on the title: "vast tracts of time good moments say what I may less good too they must be expected", and again "passing time is told to me and time past vast tracts of time the panting stops and scraps of an enormous tale as heard so murmured to this mud". The not-quite-repetitive structures of this novel, in which the reader is often unsure as to whether a turn of phrase (or an entire paragraph) has not occurred before, have parallels in this music, as do the frequent half-remembered lapses into platitude, for example "the eyes burn with severe love I offer her mine upcast to the sky whence cometh our help".
In Tract I, the in-built restrictions of the instrument (the two hands of the pianist, the chromatic scale, the decay of struck sounds, and so on) are augmented in several ways, for example the pianist’s hands move in parallel almost throughout, and the upper reaches of the piano keyboard are hardly ever heard. Within these constraints, a dense and complex polyphony gradually unfolds.
Tract II, as if after "vast tracts of time", begins almost exactly as its predecessor, but the evolving thread is now rapidly lost, exploding into disjointed lines which spread themselves over the whole keyboard. This process forms the first (entitled hypothesis) of five étude-like sections which re-examine the materials of Tract I from radically different angles. The second, husk, applies a similar process of fragmentation to some ‘remembered’ materials from the past (the slow movements of Beethoven’s Op. 109 and Op. 111 sonatas), leading to the third, the light gleams an instant, in which fragments of Tract I, played by the left hand, are confronted by a right-hand part confined to the highest register of the instrument. The fourth section, lacunae, returns (between a sequence of silences) to the Beethoven material, which has now been ‘stretched’ to occupy the whole keyboard and is gradually further obscured by clusters, and the fifth, as heard so murmured, recapitulates the entire pitch-structure of Tract I, highly accelerated, from which melodic outlines condense and are reabsorbed. A satisfactory "closure" has become impossible; the strands of development traced through Tract I have become lost in their own proliferation; as in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, "They gave birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more".