Current Project 

​​​For more information about Tricia Dawn Williams please visit www.triciadawnwilliams.com

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Paul writes: 

The charming toy piano is actually not an easy instrument to write for, with an often-clumsy action which means it cannot play fast passages.  However, its sound is so instantly recognisable, and it immediately evokes childhood, magic, illusion, and sheer fantasy.  It arouses thoughts of an unreal or lost world.  The grand piano, on the other hand, is arguably the ‘grand wizard’ of instruments, capable of conjuring up so many sonorities, and being able to mimic an entire orchestra and much more.

 

The birth of this piece has taken a slightly unusual path.  Having received the commission from Dawn, together with some specific instructions and time limit, I set about drafting sketches. I immediately started thinking about a larger-than-life character who could manipulate, transfix, tantalise, beguile and command.  And this was combined with the surrealist art I love and grew up with (my mother painted so much surrealist work).  And then there was the daily news, focusing so much on the politics of charlatans who cast their magic spells on their often-gullible people.  I imagined a grandiose character that was both enigmatic and ambiguous: possibly genial, possibly malevolent, but certainly a combination of many characteristics.   

 

The sketches became the foundation to a huge (second) concerto for piano and large orchestra that I wrote on a whim.  I abandoned the immediate commission, knowing I had many months to complete that work.  Then I could turn to the task in hand, and the sketches (the exact same musical material I had naughtily yet intentionally used in that concerto) have taken on a new life, independent yet complimentary, and with a totally different structure.  And the sound world is so different too, because I chose to create an other-worldly electronic soundscape that could act as a cohesive and magical force that allows the two pianos (real and toy) to expand their ideas (their spells and their stories).  Ultimately, both this work and the concerto will be companions – the very same illusionist casting the same spells from their ‘box of tricks’, yet yielding different and unforeseen results.

 

The electronics are using sampled sounds of bowed metal percussion instruments as well as more conventional ‘struck’ sonorities in ranges that simply don’t exist, and using quarter-tones (the notes in-between conventional semitones) that these instruments cannot play.  So, through electronic manipulation, the unreal is being created out of the real, and the two keyboard instruments will act as the seeming masters of all that goes on. 

 

There is no story to this work.  This will be music to evoke individual responses, but the piece is certainly born from visual imagery.  It will be fascinating to see how a visual artist responds to this work, as that is the intention for the premiere.