Passing bells: night

Chris DENCH
Born 1953, London, England

Passing bells: night planctus for piano (2004-05)

piano solo

The passing bells rang all day and all night  . . . 
--Barbara TUCHMAN A Distant Mirror

 . . .  below our world, lower than networks used by atoms or subatomic particles,  . . .  it is very quiet. Down there is a deeper silence than we can know, a great emptiness.
--Greg BEAR Dead Lines

When New Yorker Marilyn NONKEN asked me for a solo piano piece, I knew exactly what kind of piece I had to write, although it took me several years to achieve the detachedness to do so. I decided to relate the new work to a previous time in Western history when people knew themselves to be under attack from a palpable but invisible enemy whose motivation was obscure, another occasion when culture and society were irreversibly transformed: the Black Death. Passing bells: night is, as I write, a work-in-progress, a first step towards a larger piece that collides two separate works, passing bells: day and passing bells: night, to produce a planctus, or lament, for our troubled times---not least the threatened demise of the culture in which this music belongs. But then perhaps everyone believes their times to be troubled, to be the end-time.

Even this version of passing bells: night is provisional; eventually the work will consist of a series of crystalline bell-sounds interrupting plainchant-like monody. However, this first étude for the piece consists solely of bell-sounds. I completed the sketching of the music just as the tsunami was creating misery and despair across the Indian Ocean. Planctus, indeed.

Programme note © Chris DENCH