For Yves, After Hiroshi

About For Yves, After Hiroshi

For Yves, After Hiroshi is an experiment in what I am beginning to call quantum rhythm. It was commissioned by the American Harp Society, with many thanks to the harpist and new music extraordinaire Elizabeth Huston. The recording above is a MIDI, but Liz and I have been working on a recording of the piece, and I’m told it will be premiered at an American Harp Society conference one of these days. Sweet.

Each harpist plays the exact same material, but each is playing at a different tempo: harp one at 89 bpm, harp two at 86, harp 3 at 82, and harp 4 at 77. The result is a sort of wash of echoes, occasionally syncing up in dramatic ways. It feels a little like twisting the swing knob on a drum machine. I got the idea as a variation on this experiment with Satie by Brendan Landis.

To make it work, each harpist has their own click track, and the material is extremely simple (one chord, really), to keep the sound from clashing with itself in ways that would distract from the rhythm.

Regarding the title, I’d wanted to write a tribute piece to the painter Yves Tanguy for a long time, and the sound world that was the result of this experiment gave me the same feelings that his paintings do. The simple material reminded me of the music of Hiroshi Yoshimura, whose album Music for Nine Postcards is among my all-time favorite albums.