Three Studies in Green Textures: III. Springing

Springing
Study no 3 from Studies in Green Textures

Studies in Green Textures
The characteristic of the piano that has always interested me and which represents, in my opinion, its quintessence, is its ability to produce complex and elusive textures. This aspect of piano writing seems to me to still contain a part of mystery and is what spontaneously awakens in me the strongest and richest synaesthetic sensations. The Studies in Green Textures explore some of these dense textures of color-sounds, using multiple idiomatic piano techniques.

Another aspect of textures that fascinates me and that I have taken into consideration is the game with the perception of the interpreter and the listener. The texture is made up of sounds that are moving too fast to be able to follow their individual paths. Perception is necessarily global. But the listener, and the interpreter, can constantly filter the moving sound stream and extract some fragments or briefly chase its elusive details. Segments of phrases fleetingly catch the attention and then plunge back into the flow, disappearing to immediately let other elements appear.

This continuous movement from the whole to the details and vice versa, this constant navigating within the texture, give rise to the illusion of multiple simultaneous sound layers.

Springing
The first part of Springing is based on the technique of repeated notes. Each sound, performed slowly at first, progressively reaches a higher “flowing speeds”: the density of repetition of each note depends on its register and on its position within a non-octave-repeating scale. Shortly after the middle of the piece, the principle of repetition is no longer applied to single sounds, but to a pattern, on which secondary elements – ripples, small perturbations and reverbs – are gradually superimposed, in a game of refractions on four distinct sound layers.

Filippo Zapponi