Topologies
for piano (1979-1980)
This work is available from United Music Publishing
In the late ‘70s I was beginning to find my feet as a composer. I had, in helical of 1976, discovered a soundworld that felt right, felt personal. It was one part Scriabin, one part Xenakis, one part Barraqué, and what remained, little though it might have been, was entirely mine. That was fully fifty years ago; I had to re-examine the score of Topologies to get the correct dates: 1979-80. I was 26, and this was my first piano piece on any real scale. Like most novices (I had written a plethora of works already, distinctive in their own ways, but not ‘adult’ music) my problem was extending the material beyond a few short phrases without stumbling. I had a nagging thought that ‘number’ might offer a possible solution, but ‘number’ is a very vague concept. What I had in mind was in fact ‘Nature’, the idea of a piece growing organically. Topologies was, then, a creative laboratory, my investigation of how to emulate in music the in-time unfoldings that happen in, for instance, plants. At that stage the most sophisticated numerological generator I could come up with was the Fibonacci series, even then rather a hackneyed fallback. So the primary sections of Topologies have internal durations that permutate 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13… units – but even then I was an adequately equipped composer to be able to conceal my ‘art’ somewhat, and the Fib-ness of it is not grossly apparent. To me at least. I recall finding it frustratingly uncooperative technically; after all, if you partition Fib values by Fib values you get …Fib values. Which may be fascinating for numberphiles, but compositionally results in an rather characterless degree of self-similarity.
I addressed this inarticulacy in Topologies by adopting an elevated level of rhetoric; the piece continually confronts hyperactivity and repose, dispersive and accretive behaviours, oscillations and filaments, wedges and girders. This polarity comes partly from the origin of the piece’s title; it is a reference to the novel Topologies of a Phantom City by Alain Robbe-Grillet, which has – I seem to recall – mirrors as a recurring trope. In all honesty, I quite rapidly went off Robbe-Grillet as an author; after a first flush of enthusiasm I found his books did not bear repeated reading. (I recently revisited his films and was annoyed by (among many other things) how his rather childish mannerisms undermine their earnestness of purpose). Today, I see the accordioning of density and texture in the music as corresponding to the ‘topologies’ of the title. The Robbe-Grillet traces I’ll allow to quietly dissipate.
Although it is contemporaneous with my chunky First Symphony, Topologies has a handle on extended, albeit primitive, structure that the symphony lacks, and this gave me confidence that my reach was extending. A few years, and much trial and error later, I managed to synthesise a way of working that achieved my compositional grail: I can now directly generate the structure and trajectory of a piece, its material, and its character, all from its title. My feelings of frustration while writing Topologies acted as a major catalyst towards developing this much more personal method of compositional genesis.
Topologies was written in Tooting, South London, and brilliantly premiered by my old friend Michael Finnissy on the fabledly bad British Music Information Centre piano. Since that auspicious, if clangy, first outing, it has been played by several admirable pianists, including the late lamented Yvar Mikhashoff in Hong Kong, James Clapperton in Berlin, and Michael Levinas in Paris. It has also appeared on CD, played by Ian Pace, who gives a marvellously detailed and analytic, and convincing, account of the music. I was amused to read a review when the CD came out that indirectly dismissed Topologies as being derivative of the other pieces on the disc. And yet it was the earliest written…