This week I was chairing piano exams at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and at the end of the day I found myself all alone in a big hall, with the beautiful Steinway grand piano I had been listening to all day. So I took this rare opportunity to make a few very short improvisations in a row, and recorded them on my phone. For some reason, playing on an instrument of such quality, in a lovely acoustic, has an intimate quality that fires my imagination in various interesting ways.

Here are the four improvisations (titles and notes about the pieces below the video – the first one is just a fragment really, so stay with it…):

1. Pièce froid (after Erik Satie’s pieces with that title – I used to love playing these when I was a student, and performed them once, so some of the physical feel of the patterns seems to have lodged itself in my head). This is just a ‘reminder’ excerpt of a longer, unrecorded improvisation I had just made, as I will probably flesh this out into a piece one day. It has a chord sequence which could be classical, folky or even popular music in style, so I need to think about what I want to do with it.
2. French. This one, like the two that follow, is genuinely improvised, with no forethought at all – but to me it’s clearly influenced by the second piece from Debussy’s Images Série I, itself an ‘Homage à Rameau’, which I had heard earlier that day.
3. Fractals. I am quite keen on this one – there’s some imperfection in my playing technique, but half way through, a slight mistake triggers a change of direction in response, and the music seems to fracture and atrophy in ever-decreasing circles.
4. Depths. In this piece you can practically hear my brain trying to find the notes I am hearing in my head on the keyboard! I was a bit fearful of making a misstep that would ruin the effect of playing oscillating fifths in the upper register and then recontextualising them with a deeper harmonic context (apologies for the technical terms – but it’s the way my brain works while I’m doing this…)

For now this complete video is for you, my patrons, only – I may make it more widely available soon and will share a clip online, but I wanted to share the whole thing with you!

[UPDATE: this is now a public post available to all – if you like this and are not yet a patron, please consider becoming one by following this link and clicking the ‘Support Stuart’ button. I’d really appreciate your support!]

Thanks as ever,

Stuart