Waiting for the Aeroplane (solo piano)

for Piano

Overview

Waiting for the Aeroplane captures a time when I was travelling to Greece to visit my family, who had recently returned there from New Zealand to live. The emotion of farewells, the sense of the distance between the two countries and the power of aircraft, and the frenetic activity of airports all found their way into the piece

The piece was my response to the emotional experience of contemporary air travel: long periods spent passing the time in a kind of awkward limbo, concluded by abrupt partings with loved ones. The alternating two-note ostinato which opens the work, and remains present throughout, evokes the sense of anticipation, while the interjections of melodic fragments above this ostinato are like the fleeting, distracted thoughts and conversations occupying the individual obliged to wait at the behest of influences outside his or her control. Intense jazz-influenced flourishes bring a brief rush of energy, seemingly signifying the arrival of a long-awaited, yet rushed, departure.

I wrote this piece while I was a Masters composition student at Victoria University. I worked most of it out at the piano, and handed the finished score over to my closest friend at the time Dan Poynton. Dan championed the piece and played it quite a few times. He asked me to make an extremely sensible change; in the climax of the piece (the section that has always stopped 99% of interested pianists from taking it on) everything in the LH was a demisemiquaver (32nd note) to the left of where it is now. Dan suggested shifting the right hand one 32nd note along, so that the left hand content could then be 'on' the 16th, and not on the offbeat 32nd. I grumbled and resented the suggestion, but did it anyway. Of course it transformed the legibility of the score, and I didnt hear any discernible change.

Hearing Dan perform this work many times gave me a lot of early confidence as a composer. It does really amaze me that this piece is still performed from time to time. The last high Bb in the right hand is there because Dan had told me a story about a Chopin piece (a mazurka maybe?), in which right at the very end, when everything is resolved, Chopin introduces a flat 7, transforming the tonic harmony into a secondary dominant, right before the piece stops. I loved this idea (especially if it happened so long ago, when rules really were rules).

I remember taking this piece as a work in progress to Jack Body for feedback. Every single time, he would suggest I change the C-G ostinato to something else. Did I really want it to be so utterly consistent from start to finish? It's deeply impacting when your professor challenges you in this way. Because they are generally full of excellent advice and feedback, and you want to please them, when you're a student. The thing is - and this is where Jack and I diverged - I liked the ostinato, and didn't want to change it because I really enjoyed hearing it stay the same throughout the changes and environments it travelled through. It's unchanged at the end - like a rock against which everything else has been crashing and trying to affect.

Many years later when Jack was retiring I reworked this piece into Waiting:Still for piano and solo gamelan. Both the original material and the use of gamelan were intended as hommages to Jack.

Dan's recording on Rattle's "You Hit Him He Cry Out" album is still the one for me: