CRYSTAL CAR

During the early stages of the quintet’s life, the tunes were almost all lengthy and complicated in some way. I promised myself that I’d try and write something that fitted onto one sheet of A4 and was concerned solely with creating a strong melody. With no real ballads in the set I decided that I’d try and write something that was quiet, lush and simple.

I am always very aware to place some element within a piece that acts as a constant, to help keep a sense of cohesion and glue everything together. In ‘The Crux’ it’s firstly the same rhythmic anticipations in the melody and then the held Gb, ‘Sirens’ has the osinato piano part, ‘Mr. Skinny Legs’ has strong motifs in the melody and then a rhythmic figure that stays constant during the morph from simple to compound time, L.H.B. takes an identical piano rhythm through a metric modulation and ‘Steep’ is held together by its repetitive bass riff. For an exercise in creating something simple, however, I opted to try and use a harmonic device.

A - If you listen carefully when the sax enters and the bass has finished playing the tune, you’ll hear that the root notes of all the chords are constantly falling in 3rds. I change between minor 3^rd intervals and major 3^rd intervals to explore how they affect the brightness or darkness of each harmonic shift. To then stop the piece from seeming like it’s falling into some inescapable cycle of descent, the last 8 bars (C) use a rising melody and 2 rising chords to take it back whence it came. Both the tune and the last 8 bars can be cycled seamlessly. The cycling of the main tune brings more melancholy whereas the rising nature of the last 8 bars seems to give more promise if it’s cycled.

Due to the fragile nature of the tune (quiet, slow, potentially melancholic) I was really drawn to a quote from British rock climbing legend Johnny Dawes’ autobiography ‘Full of Myself’. During one of his typically bold first-ascents, he felt a level of fragility that he felt paralleled the preposterous proposition of attempting the Monaco Grand Prix in a car made from Crystal.