In this piece, written by Tom Johnson in 1985, the pianist plays all
8178 chords that are possible
within one octave - 13 notes from C to C - going from all possible
2-part chords, through the 3 part chords, etcetera, up to one 13-part
chord. A full description and free score of the piece can be found on
Tom Johnson's
own website.
The piece is structurally very simple but very rich and intriguing. It
is a harmonic
piece, obviously, but surprisingly it's quite melodic and
rhythmically very vivid, too - you can even hear something like
counterpoint happening. One very surprising effect one might notice in
a full performance is that though it is basically constructed entirely
out of all
ascending lines, you start hearing descending lines when the texture
gets thick. This is a 'ghost melody' that appears when certain
ascending voices are , one by one, 'filling up' a hole in a cluster;
the
voices ascend, and therefore the hole descends. (Just read the score
and try to find out how the 12-part chords proceed to see what I mean!)
The fragments of this performance were recorded in Vienna at the
"Wiener
Tage der Zeitgenössischen Klaviermusik" in february 2005, when I
was a guest of the festival -
Tom's piano music being the subject of that year's Wiener Tage. The
selections are from the beginning of the piece, and the 1287 8-part
chords which happen a few minutes after the middle.
I have a very particular relationship with this piece, since I was in
2002 the first pianist to take it up after Tom himself, performing the
piece at about double his tempo. Since then, a few other pianists have
been known to attempt the piece, though as far as I know my high tempo
interpretation remains unique.