News
#7 – Posters
by Tristan Latchford
Date added: 24/07/2024
Last week, I spotted that there was still a poster up at Anglia Ruskin of our most recent series of 'Yearnings for Home' . It's always a delight to see an old poster, yet my natural instinct remains to take them down the instant they are out of date to replace them with the next set of excitements.
In this case however, my hand was stayed for a brief moment of reflection. The success or otherwise of a concert is often most visible in hindsight because it takes time for people to reflect on their experience and provide feedback. In the three months, since this poster had been placed, the series had happened, and the feedback continued to come in, including some memorable feedback that said their favourite moment of the concert was watching the Pianist 'reach into the bowels of the Piano to energise the strings'.
This particular compositional device occurs several times in 'Yearnings for Home', and was chosen to emphasise the rhythmic patterns of the Violin, and act as a clear delineator between the first and second sections of the piece – the muffled stroke of the D and G poised in attempt to ring in the listeners mind and draw the ear to the new, significantly thinner texture of the subsequent section. In some ways, it feels like pieces with multiple movements have this kind of delineation in place by default; the piece stops, and starts again. But these 'delineators' become more important in the context of a piece that is continuous, or has a two-dimensional form (like tone poems! See Steven Van de Moortele's excellent work on this).
The ear needs a bridge to link the materials of the sections together, and a signal to know that the piece is to move on. Its not that there is an expectation for this to happen, but rather that (when done correctly), the new material fits with the old, but remains distinct, and a pleasant surprise. Its these sections of a piece that I sometimes find myself wrestling the most with, often because natural tendency seems to take me toward a complex compositional answer when a simple one is often most suited and most effective.
At this moment, Abi Pateman walked through the door, and told me that the department liked having the poster up! It seems my hand shall be stayed a little while longer.
I look forward to finding out how long it remains there!
