Winter Spaces
A teacher once told me that he thought there were two types of music:
that which tells a story and that which lives in a space. I don't know
that this is right, but I have always liked the idea of music that occupies
a space, that doesn't feel hurried to develop into something else when
what-it-already-is is immersive and beautiful. Classical training
places a lot of emphasis on form and development,
but I've always felt some connection with American minimalism,
ambient music and other spare compositions like late Feldman and Kurtag,
and to a lesser degree spectral music,
specifically because they create for me the sense of sitting in a space
even when they are in fact unfolding and developing over time.
I'm not a theorist, I don't exactly know why
these types of music are all related in my mind, but I can assign
some words to it: resonance, color, repetition, transformation,
immersion, space, breath. From a compositional angle, these pieces
are about inflecting some sense of musical space with the
earnestness and development that comes with the 19th c. piano repertoire.
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