I have never especially had much to do with David Whyatt until this year but I have found myself increasingly engaging in conversation with him as I discover that our tastes in music are more alike than it would appear at first glance. David’s presentation in comp workshop this year fascinated me to find that there are others in composition who do actually mean to retain some of the traditional techniques particularly from early music and that there are those out there who are willing to perform it.
Family history has never especially fascinated me and to be perfectly honest, perhaps from poor experiences in the past, fascinations with finding history can irritate me but I truly appreciate David’s motivations and then taking that history into his music and working to find ways to express it. I have tried many times to begin a series of works and have completed many firsts in series’ of work but never followed through with the second installment and much as David is forced to thanks to the impending pressure of a recital, I have great respect for that.
The most fascinating part of David recital has come actually through the conversations following the recital itself. We have on many occasions discussed some of the instrumentation and techniques that he plans to use in his works and I am endlessly interested in the use of early instruments such as the baroque cello (although I would have preferred a viola da gamba) and the techniques of cadence that David is working with.
Just the other day while waiting for a recital, we got to discussing the way that composers of the renaissance used cadence rather than harmony to form the structures within their music. Not taking each line as a whole but one note to the next and the connotations that has for music, the sense of completion and wholeness that while very achievable and poignant throughout what we now consider more traditional harmony, adds a different perspective to that approach. I have discussed before my fascination with how pieces land at home, how to create a sense of completion and cadence is of course the most effective way but without the preparation of previous cadences, a jumble of the two techniques can often fall to a flat ending or to no ending at all despite the music perhaps ceasing.
Overall, it is the inquisitiveness of David’s music that really inspired me to continue searching for techniques in the past and bringing them forward in the now.
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