This is an experiment in rearrangement. It started life as a few minutes of piano improvisation, playing around with some slightly jazzy chords and a simple repeating rhythm (see below). At the time I was not really sure where it was going (if indeed it was going anywhere!) but I decided to play around with it a bit to see what I could do with the harmonies and textures.
I broke down the version I had played into (mainly) 16-bar sections, which was where the natural breaks fell anyway, and separated the individual left and right hand parts of each. Then, following the same type of scheme as the “Ostinato” pieces, I aligned the resulting 10 parts and played around with different combinations.
It turned out that 3 or 4-part combinations seemed to work well and give some interesting effects, so I decided to stick to 2 compatible left- and right-hand combinations, i.e. 2 pianos. This seems to give enough potential for the parts to overlap without complete overload, and leaves open the possibility of real-life performance (2 pianos in a single room is more likely than, say 5 or 6!).
I think it generates some interesting effects. Obviously aligning different sections creates quite a lot of discord, but I find it interesting that the original melody can still be followed through this “fog” even though, at times, almost all of the notes immediately around it are being played by either one piano or the other, I think because of the “priming” effect of having heard it earlier. I also like the idea of 2 pianos playing exactly the same thing for the last section: I’m not sure how well this would work in practice, but it would be interesting to try…
The individual lines are labelled and colour-coded in the video, so hopefully you can see how they inter-relate. For comparison, the original version (taken from my improvisation, although not a direct recording of it) is below so you can trace where each line came from.
Julia Sherriff 