narcosis (2007)

Hi y'all.

This is an older piece of mine, written in February 2007, about 8 months before I started my studies (and when I was still in school).

It was the first piece to write which was not tonal in the sense that all my pieces prior to that were, and it also marked the end of this groups of tonal quasi-romantic pieces I was writing until then (and my output was practically none until I went to Guildhall and wrote my first piece there again).

At the time I was learning on the piano Dello Joio's Suite for Piano (which was the most contemporary thing I had ever learned on the piano back then - sadly dating to 1945) (I say sadly because that's mostly due to lack of proper music education in Greece, and also because of the scarcity of modern/contemporary recordings or scores, or concerts in fact), which is obviously an influence.

The piece is based mostly on quartal harmony (which is why it's influenced by the Dello Joio piece), and I'm also using a bit of 12-tone in there, but in a much more free sense: each phrase's most important note (which I considered to be the lowest audible pitch) is part of a 12-tone row.

Also, the writing of the piece took place alongside the writing of the poem which accompanies the piece, and they share a lot of characteristics. I named the piece "narcosis" because after sitting for hours on the piano and ending up with the first phrase, I went to sleep and during my sleep I saw a weird dream, that there was a person on a surgery bed, and everything was very bright, but his/her face had no details, although all the other characteristics of the room (and tools and stuff) were quite clear, and I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote on a piece of paper "νάρκωσις", which is the actual Greek word for "narcosis". Then, I wrote the poem describing what I saw, and although I didn't try to make any associations of the "oh, that sounds like a dream!" kind with the music, the music itself represents narcosis in the sense that, when you're under an anesthetic (total anaesthesia, not just a topic one) you're very aware of the state you're in, but you don't know quite why you're there, and you have a lot of thoughts which drift by, and you can't quite hold on to them or examine them very well, and the next thought takes over, and then it just keeps going on and on (I've had a surgery in the past, so that's from personal experience - it might not be the same for everyone, obviously). So, in the piece, there are musical fragments/phrases which just sound, and then there's a gap between that and the next one, and everything sounds a bit similar to the thing you heard before, but there are no exact repetitions, so it's a constant flow of musical material, generated through my discovery of quartal harmony.

Blablabla, I thought I could wrap this up in a lot less, but apparently I failed at doing so.

Anyway, here's a recording of it from near the time I wrote it:

SoundClick artist: jujimufu - page with MP3 music downloads

And here's another recording, recorded at a concert last July (both recordings are by me):

SoundClick artist: jujimufu - page with MP3 music downloads

and lastly, just a small experiment with superimposing a slowed-down performance of narcosis on the live performance reversed and slowed down even more.

SoundClick artist: jujimufu - page with MP3 music downloads

Enjoy :)

narcosis.pdf

holy crap juji uploaded a piece!

It's very lush, but pensive. I really liked it, especially since it's definitely modern without resorting to the harsh dissonances and needlessly odd rhythms that I tend to favor...

Quite meditative. Like the mix of pentatonic and chromatic scales and rhythms.

Have you ever thought of writing more short piano pieces as a larger set? It seems to demand it - especially with the rich imagine your poem gives on the front page.

so, you kinda get into narcosis inflicted melancholic dreaming, and there's the clap part:headwall:

it's very nice, has a smooth opening,

i was trying to guess where i have heard some sequance like that (it certainly evoked some similarity to me) and i remembered - it was opening part of 'trace' from fennesz and sakamoto's 'cendre'.(you can stream it here[if you are not familiar]http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/download/42690-christian-fennesz-ryuichi-sakamoto-trace-stream

needless to say i like it, if not for the clap, i could've gone repeat mode :P

that was absolutely beautiful. i loved it and would buy your CD.

that's really all i could tell you :mellow:

i definitely agree with the person wot said you should consider this with a set of other short piano werks. not because this doesn't speak on its own (just the opposite is true), but because i would love to hear it basically, asidfuhasdfnalxkjnfkwae.

I'm glad you guys enjoyed it :)

I was thinking about writing more short pieces like that when I finished it, but it just didn't work.

In any case, now that I look back at it I think it's just fine on its own - I think the world needs to learn how to appreciate the very short (small) and the very long (big) a bit more (not just in music) (also, not to say that my music is doing that) (or that I left it a single piece because of that) (but I mean that I wouldn't compromise in terms of length just because an audience is expecting something more than 30 seconds and a lot less than 40 minutes) (not to say again that I intend to write in extreme lengths just for the sake of it) (although it might be interesting to start a piece without any intention of ending it and see how far it goes before you actually end it) (if you end it, that is..) (nuff said)

Hey, juji!

I loved your piano piece. If I had to characterise it, I would call it "introspective", almost meditative. At least, that's the feeling I get.

I agree with you that the duration of a piece shouldn't be an issue (I actually dislike any kind of sort of "imposed" restrictions)...

Alexandros