Music by Andrew Byrne
Stephen Gosling, Piano
David Shively Percussion
This CD contains Andrew Byrne’s recent pieces for piano and percussion:
White Bone Country for piano and percussion, Tracks
for solo piano, Fata Morgana for prepared piano.
Below is information on the indivual pieces (including audio), track
listing, and bios on performers.
White Bone Country for piano and percussion
“To see the desert is like peeling the skin off a landscape”
(Fred Williams)
This evocative statement by the great Australian landscape painter Fred
Williams was the inspiration for the first work on the CD. In White Bone
Country, Byrne pares the music back to its bare bones and discovers an
inner landscape full of moving shapes carved from time. The enigmatic
stillness and vastness of Australia's outback led painters to new ways
of distributing forms and surfaces on the canvas. Byrne explores the
sonic possibilities of this esthetic heritage, making a sound “canvas” that
is no longer a story from beginning to end, or from foreground to background.
Gone are traditional piano and percussion melodies and textures. Instead
a sparse and delicate musical world emerges to the ears. In each of the
nine pieces, a musical snapshot is captured and sustained through circular
melodies and rhythmic processes, giving the listener the impression of
going inside the music. Whether it’s a fixed in melody that slowly
falls in register (no. 1) or a quiet mysterious repeating incantation
(no. 2) or buzzing crotales that build and then die away (no. 3), what
is constant throughout White Bone Country is the meditative quality,
evoking a magical auditory environment.
The relationship between the piano and percussion also reflects the enigmatic
quality of the music: in some pieces (1, 5, 8, and 9), the two instruments
fuse in rhythmic unison to create a colorful “super” instrument;
in others (4 and 6) they exist on different planes; while the remaining
movements are solo pieces.
Tracks for solo piano
Tracks takes the listener on a musical journey--a circuitous voyage through a land of varied topography. Over eight minutes, the music moves in ever tighter concentric circles before finally arriving at the destination in the final section. Simultaneous motives animate the ear's journey, creating tensions through complex overlaid rhythms. The relentless rhythmic character vanishes in the final section as the arrival is marked by the sudden appearance of a joyful melody.
Fata Morgana: Mirages on the Horizon for prepared piano
The image of fata morgana, or mirages, is the inspiration for these four pieces. In each, a fata morgana, a static shimmering figure appears on the horizon and then just as suddenly is gone. The prepared piano—John Cage’s hybrid invention, straddling the tuned world of the piano and the untuned of the percussion—is an apt choice to depict these varied kinds of musical mirages.
TRACK LISTING
White Bone Country: Nine Musical Landscapes for Piano and Percussion
Part I: Desert Terrain
1. for processed piano and percussion (5:29)
2. for solo piano (4:02)
3. for solo crotales (4:37)
Part II: Desert Life
4. for piano and gongs (2:31)
5. for piano and bells (1:08)
6. for piano and knocking (2:35)
Part III: Desert Weather
7. for solo piano (1:49)
8. for piano inside and out (3:12)
9. for piano and crotales and glockenspiel (3:13)
Stephen Gosling, Piano
David Shively Percussion
Tracks for Solo Piano
10. (8:58)
Stephen Gosling, Piano
Fata Morgana: Mirages on the Horizon for Prepared Piano
11. First Mirage (3:34)
12. Second Mirage (3:58)
13. Third Mirage (5:26)
14. Fourth Mirage (4:34)
All music by Andrew Byrne