Wax Eloquent (2022) - for Solo Piano

solo piano

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Wax Eloquent is the characteristic solo composition of the Wax Series, alongside Wax Lyrical, Wax Wroth, and Wax Poetic. Its relative in the Wax Series is the piece for "Solo Conductor", found in Wax Lyrical. Very simply, Wax Eloquent is the musical offspring of Romantic keyboard music, built on the monolithic scaffolding of the un-distorted harmonic series. The piece is my attempt to break through the rigidity of music from the perspective of timbre; when I write with timbre in mind, I find myself looking at music as if divorced from linear time, as a wall of sound with no growth, decay, deterioration. The insights gleaned from timbral composition are offset by a sterilized, clinical view of sound, a view with little room for fluidity. The harmonic series appears to me an artifact of an unrealizable musical "perfection," overlooking basic truths about sound in the wild, like the fact that we, as listeners, seldom experience complete absence of noise. Sound is "frothy," in a way.

I realized that a simple inversion of the harmonic series with tones approximating equal temperament preserves the intervalic relationships of the overtones, and results in highly melodic, sweeping musical material, particularly in the lowest ranges of the piano. As the overtones begin to close in distance, an inversion of the harmonic series allows for highly chromatic lines in the bass, a lurching.

Wax Eloquent is presented in two parts -- humor and seriousness -- with a short coda to conclude the composition. The coda, for my Theory friends, is a reimagining of a bit of musical technology called Klangreihen, and an elementary application of it to boot. My intention with the coda is to "discharge" all lingering harmonic tensions in the space to clear the palate, returning the listeners and the performer to equilibrium.