Bozar in Brussels will be creating another rendition of my 42-speaker sound installation Venables plays Bach as part of their Organ Night at the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula. The installation explores my relationship with J.S. Bach’s Little Prelude in D minor, BWV 940. This Prelude was one of the earliest pieces I learnt to play on the piano when I was a teenager, and a piece that, over the last 25 years almost without exception, I have played as a warm up every time I sit down at the piano to compose. This installation is a kind of ‘composing diary’ recorded over about 50 days in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic lockdown, while I was writing numbers 96–100. These ‘diary entries’ form a kind of meta-composing-session, consisting of my improvisations, repetitions, explorations of the musical material for the new piece, growing out from and catalysed by the Bach Prelude.
The installation will also feature the live organ component — a 30-minute durational ‘unfolding’ of the Bach Prelude, to be performed by Bernard Foccroule. This is not really a new piece, so to speak, but more a live element of the installation: a conceptual performance based on a pitch-frequency analysis of the Bach Prelude and an exponential revealing of all 170 pitches in the Prelude over the course of 28 repetitions of it.
