Skempton piano music (1967-2017). 114 pieces
Disc 1 76 mins
Disc 2 59 mins
Disc 3 72 mins
Disc 4 25 mins
– Titles listed below
Performed by John Tilbury on his Steinway at home in Deal, Kent, UK during the second half of 2019. Recorded by Konrad Pidduck.
In 1996 Sony released my recording of selected pieces by Howard Skempton, Well, Well, Cornelius, made at Snape Maltings, near Aldburgh, in Suffolk. A creaky roof necessitated a few extra takes. There were also sorties from a nearby US airforce base that had to be accommodated. However the Sony team did a wonderful job, with skill, imagination and great respect for Howard’s music. More recently I decided to fill in the gaps and complete his entire output for solo piano up to 2017. I have also included the sleeve notes from the original Sony release because, nearly 25 years later, they are apposite and, I hope, useful.
HOWARD SKEMPTON
Introduction to recordings of John’s performances on his own piano.
What do people expect from recordings? Something that one can live with, perhaps? Something that seems just right? Something that might, to use a popular phrase, become the sound track to one’s life? Really?
If recordings are no more than a comfort blanket for the soul, the sooner we abandon them, the better. Music deserves better recognition. And so does the soul.
Listening to these recent recordings by John, who has played and inspired my piano music for over fifty years, there is recognition in both senses. There is, firstly, the shock – or at least the ‘frisson’ – of hearing something captured in its entirety, so that its character is immediately clear: disarmingly clear. This is the shock of recognizing what someone once described as “the authenticity of the heart”.
A second meaning of recognition involves celebration. There are moments, listening to these performances, when my gratitude spills over into astonishment. An extra gear is found where no extra gear could be dreamed of. Two examples must suffice. The ending of Longer Shadows – a piece overshadowed for too long! – is breathtaking. The sustaining of such a light touch in Acacia is enthralling.
Howard Skempton
10 April 2020
CONTENTS
CD 1
1. Humming Song
2. Loop 1
3. Loop 2
4. Loop 3
5. Snow Piece
6. September Song
7. A Card for Hilary
8. Waltz
9. Three Shades for Piano
10. Two Highland Dances – No. 1
11. Two Highland Dances – No. 2
12. One for Molly
13. Quavers
14. Simple Piano Piece
15. Byrd Walk for Piano
16. Shadows for Piano
17. Tondo
18. Intermezzo
19. Riding the Thermals
20. Eirenicon
21. One for Martha
22. Quavers II
23. Tender Melody
24. Second Gentle Melody
25. Colonnade
26. Quavers III
27. Scherzo for the right hand
28. Surface Tension 3
29. Eirenicon 2
30. Melody 1977
31. Eirenicon 3
32. Memento
33. Friday’s Child
34. Seascape
35. Campanella 2
36. Beginner
37. Campanella 4
38. Eirenicon 4
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CD 2
1. Piano Piece for Trevor Clarke
2. The Mold Riots
3. Resolution
4. Two Interludes for Piano
5. Close the Coalhouse Door
6. Even Tenor
7. After Image
8. Ring in the Valiant
9. Maestoso
10. A Perugia
11. Three Nocturnes – No.1
12. Three Nocturnes – No. 2
13. Three Nocturnes – No. 3
14. Horham
15. Lyric Study
16. Album Leaf (first G sharp inaudible)
17. Familiar
18. Aubade
19. Decision Time
20. Guitar Caprice
21. Cantilena
22. Starlight
23. Memorial Prelude
24. Zwischenspiel
25. Monogram
26. Penumbra
27. Bolt from the Blue
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CD 3
1. Gestalt
2. Leamington Spa
3. Octaves
4. Vale
5. Norwich
6. After Image 4
7. Arpeggio for Piano
8. Goldsmith
9. Ecossaise
10. Two Pinter Poems – No. 1
11. Two Pinter Poems – No. 2
12. Columbus
13. Little Exercise
14. Rameau Variation
15. Scorrevole
16. Longer Shadows
17. Reflection 1
18. Reflection 2
19. Reflection 3
20. Reflection 4
21. Reflection 5
22. Reflection 6
23. Reflection 7
24. Reflection 8
25. Reflection 9
26. Reflection 10
27. Reflection 11
28. Eighteen Golden Bars
29. Whispers
30. Liebselied
31. Resister
32. Acacia
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CD 4
1. Stroking the keys
2. Lull
3. The Flicker of your Smile
4. For Catherine
5. Sphinx
6. Little Barcarolle
7. Mickey Finn
8. A Beached Whale of a Time
9. Lullaby for Emilian
10. Force to be Reckoned with
11. Gralsstimmung
12. Aside
13. Hommage to Hans Eisler
14. Oculus
15. Solitary Highland Song
16. Largo
17. Piece in the Old Style
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5. Notti Stellate a Vagli (22 mins)
Performed by John Tilbury at St. John’s, Smith Sq. London on June 10, 2008 and recorded by Sebastian Lexer.
The concert consisted of two pieces, the other being Feldman’s Triadic Memories. Skempton’s piece was a world premiere.
General note by John:
Skempton notates what is for him ‘compositionally’ essential and significant: this means, invariably, pitch and register and their chronology. More often than not he gives no dynamic indications; rather, he invites the player to ask himself, what dynamic is appropriate for this sound, phrase, etc? A responsibility which, surely, the player is best able to undertake. And the player’s freedom lies in his recognition of this responsibility. So, for example, the performer is able to create a more subtle relationship between dynamics and rhythm: a given, i.e. notated rhythm, can ‘dissolve’ into pure sound, while the performance of a piece with no rhythmic indications creates, paradoxically, a rhythmic tension in which precisely the rhythm is thrown into sharp relief. In some of the chorale-type pieces Skempton notates the chords but not their rhythmic relationship, and not their dynamics. In this way the performer controls the relationship between dynamics and durations spontaneously. He is put in a situation where ‘he is conscious of himself, of his own experience of ‘long’, ‘loud’, etc. He is conscious of what he is doing and of the capacities of the instrument at which he sits. Because they can, should, be read differently according to circumstances, Skempton’s notations ‘bring the pianist to life!’
Of course, much has to be said through notation, but in my view, even more needs to be left unsaid. Too often, notations ‘say’ too much. The balance between the said and the unsaid is the essence of the composer’s awesome responsibility. In Skempton’s notations what is left unsaid is what he means but does not, cannot, write. What he means is precisely a lack of explicit intention; rather, his intention is ‘blurred’. So the performer misses the point if he tries to figure out what Skempton ‘means’ by this ‘lack of information’. The player is engaged in the act of interpreting; the material given him is no more and no less than he needs.
While I play I am imagining music rather than giving precise expression to signs. In other words I rise above the notation, having grasped the identity of the music. In any case, how can the process of the performer’s imagination be included in the notation! The playing is an imaginative elaboration which, at its best, enhances the composition.
What impresses me is how Skempton’s notations correspond to the way the piano is ‘actually played’, so that fidelity to the text is possible. Skempton’s notations embody, as it were, a human situation rather than a description of the sound – which in any case, is pie-in-the-sky – for they are directed as much towards the people who read them as towards the sounds they will make.
But it is not always possible, or even desirable, to telephone a composer, to make personal contact. It is, after all, through his notation that a composer communicates to us performers and I am often reluctant to question a composer about his score. It demonstrates an inadequacy, either of the composer through failing to produce a notation which is self-sufficient, or of myself through my inability to understand what is crystal clear. Skempton’s notations are both clear and economical, there is no dead wood; every sign is active, full of implication and resonance. And the script is impeccable.
Ultimately, however, it is to the morality of Skempton’s compositional art that I respond; there are no hard-and-fast prescriptions to keep the wayward performer in line, no control strategies; he knows that no interpreter worth his salt is content simply to do what he is told. Rather, through the subtlest of means, he elicits responses from the performer, invites collaboration on the basis of understanding and trust.
On the whole I have preferred not to structure my interpretations of these piano pieces; rather each one unfolds organically so that I experience a spontaneous necessity (or the spontaneity of my actions), a freedom, paradoxically, which cannot be predetermined. There is no interpretative blueprint by which the performer stands or falls. In performance the indeterminacies, the accidental qualities, the ‘mistakes’, as much as the results of intention, guide and influence the Skempton player; as if one is tracking the sound (‘action is merely a prelude to observation’), steering a hazardous course in which phrasing and articulation, pedalling, are ‘situational’, that is, (they are) spontaneously determined by the idiosyncrasies of the instrument and of individual sounds at particular moments, by ambience and acoustics, and by the dimensions and character of the performing space (for this recording I was playing in an empty concert hall at The Maltings, a space full of character whose own idiosyncrasy was a creaking roof!). This demands constant awareness and the ability to adjust so that unintended qualities are subsumed into the music. A chord which sounds louder than intended or anticipated can be ‘contextualised’ by the succeeding sounds, made to sound, in retrospect, ‘right’.
Rather than expressing a ‘form’ Skempton’s pieces express a state of being, and in this he resembles Morton Feldman. The music creates space and release for both performer and listener, providing an antidote to the congestion that blights our lives; and in this important respect, Skempton, it seems to me, is satisfying a contemporary need.