Jocelyn Campbell, Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Responses to Modernism entry. by King's College London

These three pieces are part of an ongoing series for solo piano, through which I am playing with formal systems of musical invention and references to various musical styles of the 20th and 21st Centuries. The idea being to straddle an ambiguous line between ‘modernist’ stylistic traits, such as an emphasis on formal construction and an abstract, non- teleological musical language, and ‘postmodern’ imitation, reference and homage to the medium of musical
modernism.
gn.1 and rgn.2 are composed using a hybrid of techniques associated with ‘spectral’ and ‘serial’ compositional traits. Both pieces used a series of pitches derived from the overtone series of a fundamental, partitioned into pitch class/level sets that are assigned to different regions of the piano’s register. I feel that these techniques both support and undermine one another, especially when taking the original intention for the development of each technique into consideration (the fact that the piano is limited to equal temperament chromatic tuning also, I feel, nicely undermines the ‘spectral’ aspects of my organisational systems) .
'nt'rl'd' is a much simpler concept; two quotations from two preeminent modernist composers, Morton Feldman and Karlheinz Stockhausen (who, at one point, were allegedly very antagonistic towards one another’s practices) are played at different rates between the pianists two hands. The quotations are both short, simple ostinati, the Feldman taken from p.3 of String Quartet No. 2, and the Stockhausen comes from Model 23 of Stimmung. I find it intriguing how these quotations fit together so harmoniously with virtually no need for any alteration.