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stepping up and radius

This year's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festiva features two works by Thomas Simaku. The pianist Noriko Kawai gives the world première of stepping up. Like all Simaku's music, stepping up requires virtuosity from performer and listener alike. It is a piece that is rewarding through its careful clarity that unfolds as the textures increase in density. Simaku has described the piece as a 'kaleidoscopic unfolding of fast and extrovert music', with a single tiny figure tenaciously generating a flourishing of notes. If this piece is about intense focus, then Radius, Simaku's second string quartet, is about the moment to moment connections of pitches in a melodic strange. It will be performed by Quatuor Diotima on Saturday, 28 November.

A2

Those in York will also be able to hear the a performance of Simaku's A2. Peter Sheppard Skæved and Neil Heyde gave the premiere of A2 in March of this year and are the music's dedicatees. The same work was also very recently performed by Peter Sheppard Skæved with Bridget Macrae (cello) at the International Contemporary Music Festival in Cyprus.

Programme notes for stepping up

stepping up, written for Noriko Kawai. Duration: ca. 10 minutes.

Composed in the summer of 2008, this piece begins with a 'song-like' expression, introduced in an extremely slow pace as if emerging from the remoteness of time itself.

Beginning on D, this idea gradually opens up (in steps, i.e. two major seconds a semitone apart) and is then 'transferred' to a different chromatic 'location' (on E-flat, to be precise), but this time going in the opposite direction. The modal colour of these four-note structures is clear to the ear, especially when they are heard separately. Nevertheless, this quality seems to have 'disappeared' when they are superimposed (which happens just a few steps after the first note). As a result of this 'super-positioning', a bigger chordal structure is obtained; but, most importantly, now it is a structure whose properties consist of both modal and chromatic elements.

Whilst the material of this 'new' structure is central to the overall harmonic vocabulary of the piece, the main focus of the music is the rhythmic exploration of the second idea, which begins almost abruptly — its character is far removed from the slow pace of the initial idea. There is, however, a clear connection between these seemingly two different ideas; in fact, they share the same material. On close examination, it is as if the initial sound object — which to begin with was far away, and we could only detect its melodic contours — is brought nearer to us, in time and space.

During this process of 'zooming in', as it were, an array of details are discovered, not least the rhythmic features, which in the initial idea seemed almost non-existent. The kaleidoscopic unfolding of the fast and extrovert music quickly gains momentum. A tiny figure though, presented in a host of rhythmic displacements, is ubiquitous (but always in the same 'location') throughout the piece; melodically speaking, it is tenaciously static, as if 'oblivious' of what goes around it.

From a detailed examination of the properties of these two, and only, ideas in the piece, a simple question arose: how can they interact, and/or co-exist?

The main compositional strategy of the piece is thus exploring the inter-relationship between these two sound worlds (modal and chromatic), their substance (melodic and harmonic aspects) and their temporal presentation (the rhythmic aspects).

As for the title, there are a good number of 'steps' in this piece, which constantly increase in both speed and intensity.

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