Slide listening

Slide-listening is a piece for piano and orchestra that departs somewhat from the classical concertino form in the relationship between soloist and orchestra. Here, the discourse is not based on a confrontation/dialogue axis, but rather on a desire to orchestrate the solo instrument, to create a kind of piano augmented by the orchestra. This filtered compositional device allows a few orchestrated residues and other autonomous textures to escape, conceived as environmental breaths akin to sound design.

Form and material converge in the figure of the glide. From the slide of the bow on the strings to the slide of diatonic clusters on the piano, from the slide of the slide flutes to the slide of the superball on the tam, from the slide of musical objects to the slide of listening situations, these sound slides collide at a sustained tempo.

This piece, created by the finalists of the Piano Campus 2017 international competition, also features what I call OEMs (aesthetically modified objects) from Schumann’s Piano Concerto (on the program for the final). OEMs are musical fragments taken from classical or traditional literature; these fragments are, rather like genetic manipulations, first taken, decontextualized, aesthetically modified and then confronted with a new musical environment.

Aurélien Dumont