(2023; piano; 20 min. 3 movements: 1. Roam; 2. Barcarolle; 3. Burble)
NB: Passage, Movement 1 (Roam) begins at 00:04:23; Movement 2 (Barcarolle) at 00:15:40; Movement 3 (Burble) at 00:19:08
Program Note: Passage (2023), for solo piano, by James Rolfe
Passage was originally written for Halifax pianist Barbara Pritchard. The premiere was delayed first by the pandemic, and then by an injury which prevented Barbara from playing the piece. Halifax pianist Joseph Dowell premiered it in Dartmouth in November 2023.
The piece is in three movements: Roam, Barcarolle, and Burble. These are loosely programmatic names; a barcarolle is a boating song sung by a gondolier in a gently rocking 6/8 metre. The title, Passage, refers to the passing of time, both in musical terms, and over a longer span, in this case as the thirty-year lapse between my first solo piano work (also originally written for for Barbara) and this one. Beyond this, I think of a piece of music as navigating a journey, be it brief or epic; a passage is also a kind of birth or rebirth, travelling through waters smooth or rough, from the known into the unknown, or from youth to old age to whatever lies beyond.
Passage was created with the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts.
(2022; piano; 20 min. 4 movements.)
NB: Movement 1 at 00:00:01; Movement 2 at 00:07:31; Movement 3 at 00:12:08; Movement 4 at 00:14:38
Program Note: Four Alibis
Four Alibis (2020) is the story of five notes, the lower half of a D major scale—sunny, innocent, and open. Over four movements, this snippet falls and rises across the piano’s seven octaves, in long notes and short, fast and slow, loud and soft, moving contrapuntally at different speeds or keys, like currents in a swirling river. Shadowy flattened minor-key versions lurk up from the depths and assume control; figures flit lightly past and dissolve into thin air. In some ways, this piece is a tribute to Beethoven and Schubert, to their ability at the keyboard to conjure up something out of nothing, weaving shaggy dog stories and eccentric loping dances out of the most unassuming yarn. It’s also a portrait of and tribute to my friend and colleague, Simon Docking, to whom it is dedicated. Four Alibis was written with the support of The Canada Council for the Arts.
(2009; solo marimba; 4 min. Pub. Edition Peters)
Composers spend much of their lives struggling, arguing, or fighting with their musical influences. In the spirit of “If you can’t beat them, join them”, I like to take music that I love, saw off a few chunks, and put them back together in my own fashion. In Sticky, the listener will hear snatches of Stravinsky and Mussorgsky, as well as a few outbursts from the other side of the tracks. I turn them around and upside down, throw them at the wall, and see what sticks. The marimbist must juggle these different strands of music, often at the same time, or with sudden gear shifts between them. This is no easy task, and the piece often leads the player into sticky situations. But the overall spirit of the piece is simple, playful, and free of hidden Satanic messages.
Sticky was commissioned by Nancy Zeltsman and was written with the assistance of a Toronto Arts Council grant to the composer. It was premiered by Beverley Johnston at the Zeltsman Music Festival at Appleton, Wisconsin on June 30, 2009.
(2001; words by Daniil Kharms; solo marimbist who also recites; 10 min.)
The Connection features a text which is rhythmically recited by the performer, consisting of a two-page letter in twenty segments, entitled “The Connection,” by the Russian surrealist writer Daniil Kharms (1905-1942). This text also generates the music, with its metric patterns being translated to rhythms, and vowel sounds to pitches. In keeping with the shaggy-dog trajectory of the letter, however, these translations are arbitrary and non- linear, and so the music, rather than acting as an accompaniment or a mirror image, becomes an independent entity, a kind of obligato to the text, unfolding with its own loopy logic.
(1999; piano; 12 min.)
Lilacs (1999) is based on “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, an elegy written by Walt Whitman upon the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865. I have faithfully (if arbitrarily) transposed the poetry’s prosody and inflections into rhythmic and melodic counterparts, and its structure into a musical narrative, while trying to project Whitman’s extravagant, high-romantic funeral wailing. The result is a kind of program music from an unknown galaxy somewhere in the 19th century: Mendelssohn or Mussorgsky it isn’t; but if it ever met them, they’d probably get along.
Lilacs was commissioned through The Laidlaw Foundation by Eve Egoyan, to whom it is dedicated.
(1997; piano; 7 min.)
All the Rage was written in 1997 as a kind of plundering of Beethoven’s Rondo Capriccio, Opus 129 (Die Wuth Über den Verlorenen Groschen, or Rage Over A Lost Penny) It’s a piece which I looked up after two infuriating weeks of vainly trying to get my phone line connected. I wondered what would happen if I replaced Beethoven’s material with my own, but left the rest intact–his form, dynamics, tessituras, note densities, etc. So I replaced the first two bars with material that was itself somewhat used (dominant seventh harmonies and syncopations, so beloved by Beethoven, plus figures from Afro- Cuban music and from Jimi Hendrix’s Crosstown Traffic). From the third bar, no more new material was necessary: in the spirit of the original, the opening motives are repeated, developed, transformed, and generally harassed until the piece ends.
The result is a piece that I would never have written. The incessant, unchanging repetition, the preponderance of four-bar phrases, the Beethovenian rhetoric (noticeable especially in the dynamics) are all foreign to my style. But sometimes it’s not a bad idea to take a vacation from yourself.
After finishing my own (per)version of this early Beethoven work (written sometime between 1795 and 1798), I found out that the original is in turn a posthumous version by an anonymous editor of a work left incomplete by Beethoven. The manuscript was auctioned off after Beethoven’s death, and bought by the publisher Diabelli, who invented the present title (replacing Beethoven’s original Alla ingharese. quasi un capriccio). One writer said of it: “Beethoven would never have resorted to the inane accompaniment figures with which the editor filled in a gap. hey are not only un-Beethovenian; they are musically poor. Note the inept dominant seventh . . .” Couldn’t have put it better myself.
(1993; accordion solo; 6 min.)
This work has three sources: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (from whence come the two loud opening chords), the Dutch composer Guus Jansen’s One Bar for harpsichord (whence the extended cross- rhythms), and the dub song Dread River by the reggae group Burning Spear (whence the wobbly groove and predominance of very short notes). These three musics, so distant from each other, brought to mind medieval isorhythmic motets, with their three distinct texts and melodies–but for the accordion, “motel” seemed more apt than “motet”.
There is very little material in this piece. For the most part, there are six possible chords, two dynamics, and two kinds of durations in each hand. These building blocks were assembled using random numbers, which means in this case many rolls of dice.
The work was written at the request of the accordionist, Tiina Kiik, to whom it is dedicated.
(1993; cello solo; 5 min.)
The family tree of Cello Motel (1993) shows its descent from Accordion Motel (1992), whose forebears include Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, Guus Jansen’s One Bar for harpsichord, and the dub tune Dread River by the reggae group Burning Spear. The miscegenation of these secular and sacred ancestors brings to mind the medieval isorhythmic motet, albeit with “motel” seeming more apt than “motet”.
There are precious few ingredients in this piece: eight chords, two dynamics, one articulation, and a coda. It was written at the request of Andrew Toovey, Artistic Director of Ixion (London), to whom it is affectionately dedicated.
(1993; piano; 13 min.)
Discontinuous Probability Fields 1 – 4 were written in 1993. My intention was to shun expression, narrative or rhetoric, instead presenting and dissecting a sound world in a static, non-directional way.
Hence the title: “fields” are the areas in which arbitrarily-chosen materials (discrete, narrowly-limited
values of pitch, dynamic, and duration) are manipulated, according to a randomly-changing,
discontinuous probability. The resulting surfaces are locally unpredictable and discontinuous, but the net result is a distinct, highly-focused identity for each piece.
(1993; piano; 11 min.)
This is one of a series of piano works featuring a predominant use of random procedures (“probability”) in its composition. Parameters (“fields”)–pitch, dynamics, and duration–are chosen arbitrarily and manipulated within very narrow, suddenly-changing (“discontinuous”) bands of possibilities. As a result, the listener is confronted with the nature of the sounds themselves, rather than by the musical structures and relationships which usually swallow them. The material of this piece was taken from the descending notes (C-B-A-G-F) found in the bass line to “America” by Paul Simon, and shared by many other sentimental tunes. The notes were transposed to nine keys, given separate durations, and superimposed to produce 159 slightly different nine-note chords. These were filtered randomly (most notes were deleted), and dynamics and durations were added (again randomly). The closing section comes from the same chords, but filtered differently, and with new dynamics and durations.
(1993; viola solo; 5 min.)
The family tree of Viola Motel (1993) shows its descent from Accordion Motel (1992), whose forebears include Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, Guus Jansen’s One Bar for harpsichord, and the dub tune Dread River by the reggae group Burning Spear. The miscegenation of these secular and sacred ancestors brings to mind the medieval isorhythmic motet, albeit with “motel” seeming more apt than “motet”.
There are precious few ingredients in this piece: eight chords, two dynamics, one articulation, and a coda. It was written at the request of Andrew Toovey, Artistic Director of Ixion (London), to whom it is affectionately dedicated.
(1993; violin solo; 5 min.)
The family tree of Violin Motel (1993) shows its descent from Accordion Motel (1992), whose forebears include Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, Guus Jansen’s One Bar for harpsichord, and the dub tune Dread River by the reggae group Burning Spear. The miscegenation of these secular and sacred ancestors brings to mind the medieval isorhythmic motet, albeit with “motel” seeming more apt than “motet”.
There are precious few ingredients in this piece: eight chords, two dynamics, one articulation, and a coda. It was written at the request of Andrew Toovey, Artistic Director of Ixion (London), to whom it is affectionately dedicated.
(1990; piano; 12 min.)
Idiot Sorrow takes its title from a line in Arthur Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations: “. . . en hurlant son songe de chagrin idiot” (“. . . yelling his dream of Idiot Sorrow”). The piece reveals itself in fits and starts: pitches are few and static, and durations and dynamics are black and white, although shades of grey gradually creep in. It was composed by trial and error between 1989 and 1991, and premiered on 1 February 1991 in Toronto by pianist Barbara Pritchard.
