Chia (piano solo)

Originally the second movement of my guitar duo Muisca, this is an arrangement for solo piano and is performed by Jian Liu on the Atoll album “Sarajevo"

This piece has always presented a dilemma. One of the great strengths of Western art music, notation, is also its curse. I wanted the music in this piece to breathe in and out as it flowed through time. There is a constant tension between giving a performer enough, but not too much, information in a score.

A simple example below. The 9/16 bars are intuitive enough; switch from feeling 1/4 notes to dotted 8ths, and the binary motion is suspended and stretched. But the 5/16 bar presents a problem - the performer can no longer feel the larger units passing through that suspended time, and must count 16th notes. When I'm writing I will usually try every conceivable possibility to make sure that the one I've settled on is the best of all options. It's guaranteed that in the 5/16 bar I tried it as 6/16 (too long), 4/16 (too short), adding an intermediary note (too busy), extending it a lot (say 3/4). But this 5/16 is the configuration that felt the most right. It reflects what has gone before, without increasing or deflating the current state of flow and momentum, and it leads on to what's next with exactly the right amount of energy and intensity. I'm sure I would have spent ages deciding on the exact length of time for this measure.

This crazy OCD approach to metre in Chia has pretty much relegated it to the 'rarely played' category. It's companion, in my output, is Minos the middle movement of Songs for Simon. This is even more extreme in its metering.