Colliding Cycles [piano 8 hands] 2 Pianos - Digital Sheet Music

SKU: A0.596526

Colliding Cycles

- for one piano eight hands -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhQlfMmSq1g (performance)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8a2Bhqi7Kw (rehearsals - in Spanish)

Unfailingly everybody whom I told about the gestation of this work asked me: "Are they four pianists in one or in two pianos?" I answer:

In one piano.

It's cheaper.

And allows the approach among pianists.

The title encloses an allusion to an apocryphal song by The Beatles, Colliding Circles, that as of the date (May 2009) is uncertain whether it exists or not, although it seems to be a hoax by Martin Lewis.

In my piece there are actually cycles of events in different tempi that collide between each other. The tempi are in proportion 3:2 (same ratio as the perfect fifth), id est, quaver (eighth) = 44, 66, 99 and 149. With this, the mentioned "approach among pianists" is relativized.

The other trackable influence, texturally speaking, is Strumming Music by Charlemagne Palestine, but without the puppets. To say "trackable" is, of course, another irony: trackable by whom?

There are more erudite references: the harmonic base of the piece is a twelve-tone and eleven-interval "hyperchord" that presents inverted symmetry. The idea itself of using such a chord surges from Elliott Carter (for instance in his Night Fantasies). This particular chord stems from a panintervalic row, the one used by Alban Berg in his Lyrische Suite. Berg also didn't invent this row, but on of his disciples, Fritz Heinrich Klein (who also carried the letters from Hanna Fuchs to Alban). It's a chord with inverted symmetry: in the extremes are complementary intervals (the major seventh F-E is mirrored in the minor second A#-B e così via).

Colliding Cycles was composed in Bremen (and on the airplane to London) on May 14th, 2009. Its duration oscillates between 5 and 7 minutes. The work is dedicated to Leopoldo Siano, in Freundschaft.

About the performance

- Each performer must have one luminous metronome (without sound).

- Primo is the performer that plays higher, Quarto, the lowest.

- The layout of the hands is intersecting, such as the first drawing illustrates.

- L is Left, R is Right. (*)

- The score is a list of sequential directions, not simultaneous.

- Dynamics: between pianissimo and mezzopiano.

- Use much pedal. How much is "much"? For instance: all the time.

(*) Effectively, a further allusion to the apocryphal songs of Lewis/Beatles, in this case to Left is right (and right is wrong).