APPROACHING IMAGES: A Journey from Imagery to the Concrete

Rui Braga Simões

The piano is an instrument filled with endless possibilities, and an absurd amount of marvellous repertoire, but also has its downsides, namely its extremely complex mechanism: fingers activate a key, that moves a hammer, that hits a string. It’s a lot of steps from the moment you imagine a note and the moment you hear it, and the resulting sound isn’t always what we hope for. This instrument can be limited for the things that are asked from pianists, such as playing singing and legato lines. However, there are ways of getting over this limitation, and one of them is the use of Imagery, I.e., having a strong imagination of something else in order to do things that, in many occasions on a piano, are technically impossible. In this artistic research I approach the concept of Musical Imagery and present an arrangement I made of Debussy’s Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (from the second book of Images) for piano and percussion quartet, exploring the imagery elements I use in my practice and explaining how I turned them into something concrete, through the use of new layers added by the chosen instruments.

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