ART WORK - KAPS FREED

Excerpt from Kapps Freed score — Excerpt from *Kapps Freed* score

Kaps Freed

Composition for piano and electronics. 20minutes. Commissioned by Gabriella Smart.

This work aims to bring the sound of the piano as close as possible to the sound of Percy Grainger’s Free Music ideals, by applying pitch tracking and spectral filtering. Delicate, sparse piano pitches are sampled and transported into theremin like tones where the tempered scale becomes irrelevant.

The piece is featured on the CD On Works for Travelled Pianos, performed by Gabriella Smart. ezz-thetics/HatHutArt, Switzerland (CD)

More information at the DOI: 10.4225/03/59f736cfd58c8

“…beautifully heard and conceived.” (The Wire 440, October 2020)

‘’Kaps Freed’ rethinks sonic possibilities for the piano through a uniquely Australian historical lens with fascinating results”(Limelight, November 2020)

“spare but very tonal notes hanging in a kind of electronic bed that gently, very gently, nudges them this way and that, as if buffeted by a mild breeze. It’s a very unique sounding work insofar as the subtle manner in which the notes are encased, almost protectively. Its 20 minutes elapse quickly, dreamlike, exceedingly lovely and heartfelt, a wonderful piece.”

— Ian Parsons, The Sound Barrier, 2020.

“Cat Hope has a keen interest in the ways in which music can be freed from the confines of conventional notation, and much of her work explores whole new vistas of musical landscape that are opened up through the use of mobile, graphic notation. It is scarcely surprising, then, that she would eventually take on her own reimagining of Free Music of Percy Grainger who, some 80 years ago, bemoaned the restrictions that even-tempered tuning and rigidly defined musical durations brought to music through conventional notation and the limits of many conventional instruments, especially the piano. His Free Music scores consist of coloured, free-flowing lines, inspired by shapes and patterns he saw on a Melbourne lake. These conjure up flowing pitches and indeterminate durations in a music freed of its conventional containments - music most famously performed on multiple theremins.

This concept formed the basis of Cat Hope's Kaps Freed, which is notated in an animated graphic score, drawn from the movements on the surface of the same lake which inspired Grainger's Free Music. Through an exquisitely nuanced interaction between piano and electronics, the music seems to take those once-contained notes of the piano and lead them into a place where pitch and duration are, indeed, freed from their former strictures. What was confined is opened up, even from the earliest moments of the piece where solitary piano keys are struck with such child-like delicacy, melting into pauses in which you can almost hear the memories of the sounds finding their own way to be free.” Ian Parsons, The Sound Barrier, PBS Radio.