Role-playing 1: strings attached, for solo piano (2019)
- piano solo
- duration: ca 7'30
- World Premiere by Tamara Stefanovich, November 10, 2019, Barbican, London
From the remarkably inventive Serbian composer Milica Djordjević comes an étude unlike any other, a piano study in which the performer’s fingers never touch the keyboard. Dexterity and fine attention to sonority are exercised, rather, inside the instrument, and the result is a soundscape of glowing harmonies, unearthly conjurings from the far bass, and eventually fragments of metal melody in the upper treble. To bring these into being the pianist has to operate four Ebows (electronic devices, intended for use on guitars, to produce the effect of bowing on a string continuously), draw on threads woven around strings in the bottom register, and use finger picks or a plectrum to scrape along bass strings or pluck higher ones, all the while keeping the sustaining pedal down so that the sounds produced can come to fullness and drift away.
Paul Griffiths