Suite for Turntables and Piano
Category: Music
Suite for Turntable and Piano — Expression
I’ve been.. a week? into the final movement.
The title is stolen from the giallo film by Sergio Martino, starring the classic giallo actress Edwiga Fenech, called Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key. Like all giallo it’s expressionist thriller, and this title comes from a previous film of his (same year, also Ms. Fenech) where a hapless victim receives a written message saying, without context and never explained: “your vice is a locked room.” We all have our creative byways.
String Quartet No. 2 — First thoughts
I’m still a couple of months away from finishing the Suite for Turntables and Piano, and I never work on two pieces at the same time, but a specific subject and musical structure came to me a few weeks ago so it’s queued up.
Continue reading String Quartet No. 2 — First thoughtsSuite for Turntables and Piano — Four months in and finishing the third movement
I’m very metrics-oriented: how long have I worked on a piece? How much music has been written? I read of writers feeling in the-same-or-similar way regarding how many pages they write in a day (it’s always very few). It’s been four months and I’m at 15 minutes of music. I don’t think that means anything.
At this point, I’m not sure that the turntable can hold up as a solo or chamber instrument. That’s a self-canceling suggestion since any instrument can be a member of an ensemble, but I’m trying to balance my fascination for the instrument against the actual experience. So more than self-canceling it’s self-reflective. Half full?
Suite for Turntables and Piano — Considerations on classification and finishing the second movement
So far writing for turntables feels most similar to writing for tuned percussion. There’s also a sense that it’s somewhere between an acoustic and an electronic instrument. Though what I’m working with (samples) are more on the electronic side, I’m writing for an instrument that produces sound via physical movement and instrument vibration as opposed to spliced tapes or synthesized sounds initiated by, crudely stated but with no pejorative intent, a button push. There is a spectrum of physicality with electronic music, and there is a spectrum of electronic music as it moves further away from a human body initiating the sound. Although this is the first electronic-adjacent music I’ve worked with, it’s been an experience more familiar than expected because of the turntable’s percussive provenance.
