Images (Skempton)

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Images is a cycle of piano pieces composed by Howard Skempton in 1989. This work and a variations set, The Durham Strike, are the only large-scale piano works by Skempton, although he has been composing piano music since the beginning of his career.

Howard While Skempton is an English composer, pianist, and accordionist.

The work was commissioned by Channel 4's HTV West for "Images", a six-part television series of documentaries dealing with various aspects of photography. The series was created to mark the 150th anniversary of the invention of photography. The producer, Barrie Gavin, wanted the music to be similar in concept to Erik Satie's Gymnopedies: in the words of the composer, the pieces were to be "like a sculpture viewed from different angles in a changing light." The pianist who performed Images for the TV series was Michael Finnissy.

Channel 4 British public-service television broadcaster

Channel 4 is a British public-service free-to-air television network that began transmission on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially-self-funded, it is ultimately publicly-owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the station is now owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation, a public corporation of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which was established in 1990 and came into operation in 1993. With the conversion of the Wenvoe transmitter group in Wales to digital terrestrial broadcasting on 31 March 2010, Channel 4 became a UK-wide TV channel for the first time.

ITV Wales & West independent television franchise area

ITV Wales and West, previously known as Harlech Television (HTV), refers to the Independent Television franchise area until 31 December 2013, licensed to a broadcaster by the regulator Ofcom.

Documentary film nonfictional motion picture

A documentary film is a nonfictional motion picture intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education, or maintaining a historical record. "Documentary" has been described as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries. Documentary films were originally called 'actuality' films and were only a minute or less in length. Over time documentaries have evolved to be longer in length and to include more categories, such as educational, observational, and even 'docufiction'. Documentaries are also educational and often used in schools to teach various principles. Social media platforms such as YouTube, have allowed documentary films to improve the ways the films are distributed and able to educate and broaden the reach of people who receive the information.

Images comprises eight preludes, two "songs" (The Cockfight: a traditional song and Song 2), a set of variations, eight interludes and a postlude (Postlude: The Keel Row). In concert, the order of the pieces is not fixed and is left for the performer to determine. The eight preludes contain the pieces that directly correspond to Gavin's request. Preludes 1–3, all written on three staves and in 3/8 time, share identical rhythmic and melodic structure of all melodic lines, with just some of the notes and the key changed. Prelude 4 is also in 3/8 time and has a somewhat similar rhythmic structure, slightly simplified and written on two staves. The other four preludes form two pairs of such almost identical pieces. Preludes 5 and 6 are both in 7/16 time, and 7 and 8 are in 6/16.

In Western musical notation, the staff (US) or stave (UK) is a set of five horizontal lines and four spaces that each represent a different musical pitch or in the case of a percussion staff, different percussion instruments. Appropriate music symbols, depending on the intended effect, are placed on the staff according to their corresponding pitch or function. Musical notes are placed by pitch, percussion notes are placed by instrument, and rests and other symbols are placed by convention.

The time signature is a notational convention used in Western musical notation to specify how many beats (pulses) are contained in each measure (bar), and which note value is equivalent to a beat.

In music theory, the key of a piece is the group of pitches, or scale, that forms the basis of a music composition in classical, Western art, and Western pop music.

The eight interludes were composed with specific scenes in mind and range from 18 to just 8 bars. Numbers 3, 5 and 8 employ free notation: there are no barlines, and the notes have no stems; note values are uniform throughout.

Related Research Articles

A prelude is a short piece of music, the form of which may vary from piece to piece. The prelude may be thought of as a preface. While, during the Baroque era, for example, it may have served as an introduction to succeeding movements of a work that were usually longer and more complex, it may also have been a stand-alone piece of work during the Romantic era. It generally features a small number of rhythmic and melodic motifs that recur through the piece. Stylistically, the prelude is improvisatory in nature. The prelude also may refer to an overture, particularly to those seen in an opera or an oratorio.

In music, variation is a formal technique where material is repeated in an altered form. The changes may involve melody, rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, timbre, orchestration or any combination of these.

Three Concert Études, S.144, are a set of three piano études by Franz Liszt, composed between 1845–49 and published in Paris as Trois caprices poétiques with the three individual titles as they are known today.

Cinco canciones populares argentinas are a set of five songs for voice and piano, comprising both entirely new compositions as well as new settings of existing melodies, written in 1943 by Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera as his opus 10. The five songs are as follows:

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Preludes, Op. 23 (Rachmaninoff) prelude

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<i>Sonatas and Interludes</i> musical works by John Cage

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La Cathédrale engloutie is a prelude written by the French composer Claude Debussy for solo piano. It was published in 1910 as the tenth prelude in Debussy’s first of two volumes of twelve piano preludes each. It is characteristic of Debussy in its form, harmony, and content.

Lento is a composition for orchestra written by Howard Skempton in 1990. It was Skempton's third work for large forces, and his first major success.

The Pleiades Dances are a series of solo piano pieces written by contemporary Japanese composer Takashi Yoshimatsu. They are, in the words of the composer, "a newly conceived set of preludes for the modern piano which takes its material from the seven colours of the rainbow, the seven pitches of church modes, and seven metrical units ranging from three to nine beats." Currently ranging from I to IX, these works were written between 1986 and 2001. Each set of Pleiades Dances contains 7 movements, which "are not placed in the order in which they appear in the work for any specific structural or contextual reasons, nor should too much be read into the curious titles [he gave] them." Yoshimatsu, in the preface to these works, encourages free interpretation of these pieces "including tempo, dynamics and frequency of repetition," and suggests that "It may also be enjoyable to play along with the rhythm by a small percussion instrument like the triangle or the tambourine." Each set, however, seems internally dependent, so that within one set of 7, the order can be freely arranged, but the character of each set differs noticeably between each set.

Marta Jirácková is a Czech composer.

Marga Richter is an American composer of classical music, and also a fine pianist.

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Piano music of Gabriel Fauré

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Camil Anton Johan van Hulse was a Belgian-American pianist, organist, teacher, and composer.

References

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