Continuous Fragments – for Piano

A little bit about the piece and my compositional process- 

This piece is a documentation of my attempt to capture ideas, and evolve them through time, in an organic way. 

It contains 14 movements and lasts 32 minutes. It starts slow and soft and ends like the ending titles of a sitcom. 

I basically sat with a recording of an improv session, transcribed it, analyzed it, fixed materials accordingly, printed the new score, practiced it, and recorded it again on a different piano. 

A little story: 

I have a ritual of visiting the piano that I grew up with . 

Since around the 2000, when I left my parents’ house, a process has started, of learning how to function as a pianist without a piano. 

Since I moved away, first to Tel Aviv, and then to The Netherlands, and nowadays to the U.S. I have developed my compositional skills, and my “analogue synth playing” skills. I got back to the piano once I finally settled in Cincinnati. 

Still, every time I visit my parents house in Israel, I sit and play my childhood piano. 

This is a ritual for me. 

I consider this piano an entity. It is like conversing with an old family member, who raised me, and we would have an hour or so, to catch up. 

I have numerous recordings of my sessions with this piano, and when I come back to my home in Cincinnati, I find myself listening to these recordings with wonder. The music I make with this piano is so different then the music I make with other pianos. New material comes to light through basic functions. My intuition moves in a different way, and I learn allot about myself and about music. 

But, as I said, the following recording, was made on a different piano. 

What I did was, I took the recording of the original session, and transcribed it. 

Through the transcription process, I found that from the attempt of playing with expectation, things I play sound like they don’t have a continuous time signature and pulse, but, along with the listener’s point of view I remembered my original trail of thought. And so, I learned that I have a “glitch” in my rhythmic perception, and, as I do often with glitches in my perception – I use them, as material, comment on them, and develop them into themes. 

In music- i think it works. In life? … 

So I transcribed the movements one by one, placing the chords according to my rhythmic perception, and found, that I create this ambiguity towards up and down beats. Beats at end of bars turn into first beats of following bars. It is like the new automatic sentence correction in phones, which makes a random additive word in the beginning of a sentence, into the subject of its end. 

Anyway… 

Continuing the process, I edited and maximized the effect of this rhythmic concept, while keeping the natural progression of a flow, going from a minimalist melancholy to a frantic cheerful flux. 

Once I completed the score I started rehearsing the edited composition. 

In the meantime my parents moved an apartment, and left the old piano at the old house. No more access to the old piano. It’s a glitch and we work with it. 

So, in the last visit in Israel, I recorded the rehearsed new score on a grand at my friend’s house. 

I think it finalized the extraction of the context. And now there is what you hear. 

The recording was made with a Zoom placed on a board just under the plate, facing the keyboard from inside and underneath the piano. 

Thank you for listening. 

Ofir