Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

Tintinnabulum is the Latin word for bell. The word and variants of it have been adopted by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt to characterise his distinctive music style. My work Tintinnabulum Variations is at once an homage to Pärt and an extension of my own practice of exploring piano resonance by means of having the sustaining pedal depressed throughout a work for piano.
I first explored the idea of piano resonance in response to a book, The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music, by American composer Dane Rudhyar (1895-1985). His chapter "Dissonant Harmony, Pleromas of Sound, and the Principle of Holistic Resonance" inspired my Three Meditations for Dane Rudhyar for piano (1984), written and first performed by me while I was living in Los Angeles. Later I developed this idea with my Resonances series of piano works (1987-1997).
Another aspect of my compositional approach, inspired by Olivier Messiaen, has been the exploration of the melodic and harmonic potential of limited tone sets, including various commonplace and exotic scales and modes. Quite a few of my pieces use pandiatonicism, a term coined by Nicolas Slonimsky to refer to music that uses only the tones of a diatonic scale but expands the traditional triadic harmonic language of diatonicism to involve other categories of chords and clusters. An earlier model for Tintinnabulum Variations is my work Birds Calling in Cloud Valley for piano (2010) that combines this pandiatonicism
idea (using only the white keys of the piano) with the piano resonance idea (having the sustaining pedal depressed throughout).
Tintinnabulum Variations is also an example of another branch of my compositional practice, that of writing homages that extend or comment on the musical processes of other composers. Apart from my Rudhyar piece, I have previously written works in this mode in homage to Pachelbel, Beethoven, Chopin, Satie, Slonimsky, Nancarrow and Sculthorpe.
My response to Pärt's style does not in any specific way correspond to his theories of "Tintinnabulation" but is rather an aural response to some of his works that I have heard.
In particular I have taken up the ideas of the simulation of a descending ring of bells (a round) and of the parallel motion of pandiatonic chords.
Tintinnabulum Variations is not a set of variations in the traditional sense. Rather it involves three different musical ideas that are developed or varied as the piece progresses.
The first is the descending scale idea; the second, an ascending chordal motive that is added to on each of its appearances; and the third is a series of linearised chords constructed from rising intervals (9ths, 7ths, 5ths and 4ths) that each have the same starting note and ending note.

Work Details

Year: 2016

Instrumentation: Piano.