Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Sensations is a work for piano trio in one movement and its duration is 14 minutes. As one of the compositions for Group A it is composed with the assumption that its performers do not necessarily have expertise in classical Arabic music, Arabic-influenced Jewish music nor in improvisation. The work consists of eleven main sections of eight different compositional techniques. Within my folio Sensations is exceptional in that it is the only work in which the individual sections are not titled. Each section has been created with its own compositional method, and some methods are applied several times in different sections in the work.

The sections extend over the following bars: the 1st section in bars 1-11; the 2nd section in bars 12-14; the 3rd section in bars 15-21; the 4th section from bar 22 until the second beat of bar 25; the 5th section from the third beat of bar 25 until the end of bar 26; the 6th section in bars 27- 37; the 7th section in bars 38-40; the 8th section in bars 41-53; the 9th section in bars 54-69; the 10th section in bars 70-76; the 11th section in bars 77-88.

The 1st and the 11th sections are perpetuum mobile toccata and employ similar approaches and musical elements. I was influenced by the Arabic popular folk dance Debka,1 and translated aspects of this dance into the work. I looked at the configuration of dance steps of Debka, and the way its dancers stomp their feet on the ground creating rhythmic patterns, accents and percussive attacks. The 1st section (bars 1-11) is written for solo piano, and the 11th section (bars 77-88), the concluding section of the work, is written for all three players. The 1st section can be perceived as a Taqsim (a solo instrumental introduction) influenced by a Debka. In this section, I have composed a demisemiquaver line based on the Athar Kurd penta-chord (D, E flat, F, G sharp, A). In order to obtain a non-legato articulation and a percussive attack, the demisemiquavers have been divided between the left hand and the right hand so that each hand plays one or occasionally two notes before the other hand enters again. The pianist plays this using a single finger on each hand (or two when there are two notes). The combination of single fingering and a fast tempo creates a non-legato percussive attack. The division between the hands, which departs from conventional Western practice, is meant to lead the pianist to perform as if his/her fingers were drum sticks. This effect depends on the quick single finger lifting that is required to play the notes in time.