Published
Tombeau De Messiaen
This work is a modest offering in response to the death of a great musical and spiritual presence. Messiaen was a protospectralist, that is to say, he was fascinated by the colours of the harmonic series and its distortions, and found therein a prismatic play of light. The tape part of my work is composed of piano sounds entirely tuned to harmonic series – twelve of them, one for each class of pitch. The ‘tempered’ live piano joins and distorts these series, never entirely belonging, never entirely separate. Tombeau de Messiaen was written for Philip Mead (who commissioned it with funds provided in part by Eastern Arts) and dedicated to him and to Jake Harvey Tavener who was born ten hours before Tombeau was finished. Sound projection by the composer.
In an exclusive world premiere recording, virtuoso pianist Philip Mead interprets ‘Tombeau de Messiaen’ for piano and tape, Harvey’s recent homage to the French composer, where the piano is continuously transformed by the swirling harmonic interactions and distortions of its ghostly tape counterpart. Also for the first time on CD is one of Harvey’s earliest works ‘4 Images After Yeats’ the epic piano solo composition inspired by Yeats’ mystical poems. The Purgatory theme is explored using fragments of music from the past (Bach, Liszt, Schoenberg,…) which weave in and out this dense and breathtaking score; a definite tour de force by Philip Mead. These piano compositions are intercut by two ‘classic’ Harvey tape pieces ‘Ritual Melodies’ and the sublime ‘Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco’ both of which have been remixed by Harvey specially for this release. Built around the themes of Death and Rebirth and spanning a range from 1969 to 1999, this CD is an essential tribute to one of the most significant composers of our times.
The next work is Tombeau de Messiaen (1994), for piano and tape, the first piece by Harvey that I heard. It contains several allusions to Messiaen—certain chord sequences, but most strikingly, for me, the climax and the descending scale at the end, a passage Messiaen himself might easily have written. The work is essentially a tribute to Messiaen as a precursor of spectralism. Harvey combines the equal temperament of the live piano with the “natural” tuning of the recording, derived from the harmonic series:
“This mixture can initially be disconcerting—the tape seems to be ‘out of tune’—but gradually what emerges is a subtle interplay between two voices seeking unison and becoming ‘attuned’ to one another, while still preserving the tensions created by the distance between them. Only at the end, in a great affirmative gesture in the manner of Messiaen, is there a sense of arrival—although even this dissipates in the final bars, when the piano, extending the idea of falling implied by the word tombeau, is heard hurling itself into the abyss in a descending whirlpool.” — J. H.
Tombeau means “tomb” in French, while tomber means “to fall”; hence the connection.