In Ignorance
A struggle to inflate a few chords; a pianist failing to dance; an absence that isn’t a vacuum.
A struggle to inflate a few chords; a pianist failing to dance; an absence that isn’t a vacuum.
In Ignorance began as a photo: An older man walking alone through one of the several marginally prosperous malls in Buffalo, New York. Harmonies throughout the piece are drawn from this image, the hue, saturation, and brightness of various colors projected into pitch space. The piece wanders across the image like one’s eye might. But this notion is complicated by several more essentially musical concerns: Only some of the image’s many shapes are chosen to be heard, arranged into a progression that seeks in vain glacially to reconstruct a moment from Brahms’ German Requiem. And, in a kind of nascent concerto, the piano struggles to propose a way in which it can contribute to an otherwise throughly microtonal music.