The Sunken Paladin

[ranjit]

I've experimented a bunch with chromaticism and whole tone scales here. Do let me know what you think!

[ted]

Your keyboard vocabulary and your technique have clearly expanded a great deal since you started posting. This one has a splendid opening, better than my openings anyway, which are reliably weak. Double notes can sound nice with that sort of texture too. With a few weeks practice you can get just as fast with them as with single notes, and they offer a wealth of harmonic combinations.

[ranjit]

Thank you so much for the feedback!

This one has a splendid opening, better than my openings anyway, which are reliably weak.

Just wanted to clarify that this is an excerpt from a long recording (around 25 minutes). This is about 17 minutes in, I think (if you would like to hear it, please let me know; I could upload it here). I tend to only post the parts I consider interesting.

Double notes can sound nice with that sort of texture too. With a few weeks practice you can get just as fast with them as with single notes, and they offer a wealth of harmonic combinations.

By double notes, do you mean thirds with one hand, or both hands playing scales a third (or some other interval) apart (such as 0:57 in the video)?

I really appreciate your help, Ted! You're one of the few people I have seen who strongly believe in free improvisation, and I feel that my personal idea about improvisation resonates with yours in that it, in a sense, involves a continuous spectrum from predictability to chaos. I don't know how to express it adequately, but it is very similar in principle, I think, to the post you made a few weeks ago when you drew an analogy to algorithmic pattern generators.

[ronde_des_sylphes]

The whole tone usage is definitely a success. There is almost an air of Debussy about some of this. I would encourage you to keep going; the more experience you get the better and it will help you to arrive at your own style and preferences.

[ranjit]

It's interesting that the whole tone scale is associated strongly with Debussy. I wonder if there is a way to play the scale without making it sound like Debussy.

[ted]

.....
By double notes, do you mean thirds with one hand, or both hands playing scales a third (or some other interval) apart ...

In this context I take it to mean the use of more or less consecutive finger pairs within either or both hands, any intervals, any texture, any rhythm, any combination of fingers. It is worthwhile to develop the mechanism because of the added harmonic weight and interest it lends to improvisation. Anything can be overdone, of course, it is just one more extension of an improviser’s palette of playing forms. In the left hand, double notes can produce a rich, orchestral sonority I find peculiarly attractive, virtually unused in classical piano music, which mostly concentrated on rapid, continuous, feathery stuff in the treble. They became a fad in the right hands of early twentieth century exponents such as Mayerl, Confrey and to some extent Waller and Morton, but in a likewise restricted mode of expression.

[ronde_des_sylphes]

It's interesting that the whole tone scale is associated strongly with Debussy. I wonder if there is a way to play the scale without making it sound like Debussy.

You could play it in double octaves (or variants thereof, eg C,E,D,F#,E,G#,F#,A#, etc in double octaves) and it would sound like late Liszt.

[ted]

Or earlier Liszt, for example the cadenza in Mazeppa where the hands alternate between the two whole tone scales. That doesn’t sound like Debussy but it is very effective. Actually, now that I think about it, Mazeppa contains several interesting uses of double notes.

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Yeah, a staple figure, but that's effectively just a chromatic scale in octaves and thus the perception isn't whole tone in nature.

[ted]

You are right, but why did I always hear it as whole tone when I played it ? That is a puzzle for me to think about.

[ted]

A few minutes thought and a cup of coffee later I think I know what happened. My slack technique used to generate different touches in the left and right hands, resulting in the ear separating the sounds of each. The brain can apparently separate musical events according to their touch. Nothing new in that I suppose, but thanks for reminding me of the fact.