MIDI piano (Yamaha Disklavier)

I always wanted to work with textures where all the notes are played at once, a quasi “Black on Maroon”-like sound. I am also contemplating a huge orchestra piece where all players play all the time. It is simply the excessiveness that interests me, and how the structure will not sound the same but constantly change because of the attention to detail. It is a kind of mass/power contemplation—the more individual the single parts become, the less energy will be transmitted, although everybody is playing.

The piece was originally conceived for a man/robot concert project of the Logos-foundation in Ghent, but we found out that their player piano could not fully execute some passages at the required speed. If I ever find the time, I’ll do a really good MIDI-version with a very good piano sound module.

The idea is that all 88 keys are active all the time, playing trills. Then one trill after the other “merges” with another trill, which creates a new pool of possible notes for this layer, which is then used. This process continues until there is only one line left. This line then undergoes several canonical procedures, until the full sound spectrum is active again. The end passage is a kind of reverse (rhythmic) fugue, where layer after layer is removed until again only one line remains. There is a strange “emotional” moment, where an attempt at a free melodic line happens (almost an “individual” voice), but the other notes tell it to shut up with a big cluster.

Moritz Eggert [ii-07]