It gives me the greatest pleasure to showcase some of the work by a nationally recognised composer, who just happens to be an EMU Director and all-round lovely human: David Power.
‘Art Decade’ is one of the three pieces that David arranged and it takes him right back to that time. David says: When I first got into Bowie in the late 70s, I’d never heard anything like the instrumentals on side two of ‘Low’ and ‘Heroes’. They led me to Eno and Eno led me to more experimental German music, the name Stockhausen kept coming up. I then got heavily into the avant-garde, the Boulez, Stockhausen, pulled back a bit and then sort of found my voice as a composer. So it all started with those two Berlin albums of Bowie.
That was why I wanted to do the project with the Deltas (The Delta Saxophone Quartet). Doing things like Art Decade or Warszawa in a classical context because It seemed to me that if they could be a gateway for me, they could for somebody else as well and the Deltas then took up the baton and ran with it, got other arrangements from other people and with the end result of the CD. Here’s a piece that you might recognise from the Bowie, Berlin and Beyond album:
I asked David about something I’d read online about him, that he’d had a creative crisis – could he share something of that and how he found his way past it?
Well, the next step after finding the really experimental rock stuff is I got into the really experimental contemporary classical stuff. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as contemporary classical. People like Boulez, Stockhausen and Varese. And It seemed at the end of a journey. So I started writing in that style. But it wasn’t right for me. And then I found myself writing music that sort of fell between two stools that wasn’t very expressive. Like when you’re trying to be something you’re not almost so, in the end, I decided to write some piano music that wouldn’t be performed and the idea was to see what happened if I took all external expectations away. I suppose I created a safe space for myself. The first one came out. Very like a Prokofiev piece, so I thought, oh, this isn’t so good. The second one which didn’t make the final cut because it simply wasn’t good enough. Then I wrote the one that is the current number two in the set which came to be known as Miniatures:
The singular, ethereal piece of music above appears on an album called 100 years of British Piano Miniatures, which puts David in the same honoured space as Arthur Butterworth, student of Ralph Vaughan Williams.
When I’d written it I thought this this is the best thing I’ve ever written. And it’s the simplest thing I’ve ever written. It is literally a grade one piece. It is so simple. But it was recorded on a CD called 100 Years of British piano Miniatures, which has done very well online – on Spotify, it’s got nearly two million streams. This helps to get over the barrier with classical music. The internet enables you to get around it because people don’t think, oh, we’ll skip this track. It’s classical music. They’re just, if it’s on a playlist, they will just listen.
And that’s what I encourage you to do – find more of David’s music here on Soundcloud and we’ll finish with a track from the Delta Saxophone Quartet that I’m sure you’ll recognise – enjoy!
