Alec Sievern: Prelude No.1

Once in a while you come across a work that’s such a absolute and immediate joy to listen that it’d be criminal not to share it: this is one of them. (When I finally got around to listening to the file Alec sent me I think I was only 20 seconds in when I told myself this had to go on the channel.)

What’s so great about this prelude? In short: it manages to stuff a huge variety of ideas into just a tiny space in a way that sounds totally convincing. Consider just what you’ve got here: motoric washes of Lydian sound in 6/8, sudden strait-laced (and gently parodic) diatonic runs in 4/4 (m.9), Japanese-style harmony & (tresillo) rhythm (m.10), polymetric descents (mm.11-13) backed by butter-smooth harmony, quartal sequential ascents (mm.14-15).

There are two things, I think, which make all this harmonic and rhythmic variety sit so neatly inside such a small work. The first is detail: there a Ravel-like exactness and rigor to a lot of the writing here. The voice-leading is consistently great (see the descending outer/inner LH voice at mm.3 and 6) and even the smallest motifs have something fun going on (the fact that the RH oscillating figure at mm.16-17 comprises two voices moving in different rhythmic contours, or that deliciously textured closing run in 7ths). And there even more subtle things you only hear the second or third time: the way the tresillo rhythm at m.10 actually sets up the polymetric m.11 by introducing the dotted quaver as a melodic unit (and how m.11 surprises us when the dotted quaver becomes its own pulse, rather than a subset of the tresillo), or how quartal harmony entering from m.14 actually breaks its sequential pattern after the first beat to better reach its target key.

The second thing – which is probably more important – is structure: the way this work balances repetition with variation. The work is in ABAB form (m.1, m.10, m.23, m.31). Broadly, this means that many things which we encounter as pleasant surprises the first time are given an opportunity to sound natural the second. But the repetition is far from mechanical, and many things are recontextualised the second time to sound fresh. So the opening motoric figure gets a chantlike countermelody when it returns at m.24, but is also lengthened through the insertion of a new 5/4 bar in each phrase. The quartal passage at m.14, whose harmony is basically unanalysable vertically, returns with long bass notes at m.33 which suddenly cast it as a A Lydian/F# Lydian/C# Lydian modulation leading to the G Dorian/Bb Lydian of m.37. And the descent at mm.18-19 takes on a much more dramatic character at m.40-41, interrupting Bb Lydian to confirm Eb Lydian as the closing modality, and stripping the arpeggios of their earlier figural complexity .

A brief comment on the performance: this is a Keyscape midi produced by Alec, but it’s a beautiful one. The decision to keep a steady underlying pulse means there’s always sense of forward momentum despite the work’s rhythmic variegation. There’s a lot of (Schiff-like) careful dynamic tiering and shading, and there isn’t a single chord which isn’t gorgeously voiced (in a way, I should point out, that’s quite hard to do on a traditional instrument). And even in non-contrapuntal parts, there is a pretty deliberate delineation of melodic and textural parts, so that nothing in the performance feels even slightly “notey”.

Видео Alec Sievern: Prelude No.1 канала Ashish Xiangyi Kumar