Lilith: A Sketch for Piano and Timepiece

As promised, let's talk about one of the pieces coming up on the September 30th concert.  Over the summer, I came up with character and plot ideas that I hope to turn into a novel one day.  One of the major characters of this novel is Lilith, and she is the subject of my latest solo work for piano.

What you need to know about Lilith is that she is a woman who lacks any emotion.  I don't mean this in the typical "suppresses her emotions in an effort to appear strong or avoid being hurt" fashion.  I mean this woman's mind cannot process even a hint of feeling, good or bad.  In this piano sketch, I sought to portray this aspect of Lilith's character.

First, I developed a motive, a set of four notes spaced a tenth apart that could not be easily interpreted as light or dark.  My aim from this point was to develop this four note motive somehow, but then something occurred to me.  Any sort of development, any change to these four notes would reflect some sort of color-shift.  For a piece that seeks to have no discernible color, this would be counter-productive.  At the same time though, I would be cheating my listeners to simply repeat the motive throughout the piece.

The solution?  The notes in the motive are ordered in 24 possible permutations over the course of the piece.  Then, to ensure that the piece lacks any rhythmic interest, the notes are played exactly 2 seconds apart from one another.  Slap on a measure sustaining the final note and a measure containing 13 seconds of silence and the net result is a 3'33" piece "sans émotion."

Naturally, the piece requires a timepiece, in my case an iPod, to keep track of the precision counting, and since the performer has to keep such a close eye on the timer, the music must be memorized.  This presents an interesting difficulty, as the piece's monotony does not lend itself very well to memorization.  The easiest way to memorize the piece is to memorize the permutation pattern and execute it in performance.  In other words, it takes math!  This must be accomplished while watching the timer like a hawk.  The piece takes a lot of focus and meditation, and that's what I love about it in the end.

Lilith will be premiered at the September 30th Project 21 concert, details for which are listed in my previous entry.  I hope to see you all there!

Speaking of math, here's an awesome electronic piece I stumbled on that's based on granular synthesis.

P.S.  If you like the picture above, it's not a person.  It's a doll!  Check out the artist's page here!