Max De Wardener is a contemporary composer who fuses classical style and instruments with modern techniques and electronic sounds. He has a very impressive and varied CV, which includes collaborations with both pop and classical ensembles as well as playing in a Zimbawean Mbira band and composing film music.
For his latest album, released on Village Green Records, he returns to a simpler and more singular sound, that of a solo piano. Of course, this is just not any ordinary piano though but tempered and detuned. In this album the pieces are performed by Jazz pianist Kit Downes.
De Wardener's compositions take inspiration from the likes of modern modernist composers such as La Monte Young and Harry Partch, but creates his own individual style into these pieces.
The piece I listened to, Foxtrot, is quite far removed from a the traditional foxtrot that it is hard to tell where the title came from. The piano is tempered but not altered beyond recognition, and in places just simply sounds off-key. The repetition of phrases is not over-used either, moving (for minimalism) quite quickly from phrase to phrase. The only other work by De Wardener of which I am aware / familiar is a short electronic piece called 'Sun Dogs' which is again a minimlaist composition but highly evocative starting very slowly and quietly building to a much swifter contemporary synthesised rhythm, and one can see the similarities in both these two pieces after listening to Foxtrot.
You can listen to this Foxtrot yourselves here - https://soundcloud.com/villagegreenrecordings/foxtrot/s-Txf1w?in=villagegreenrecordings/sets/music-for-detuned-pianos/s-NI8wZ
and the album will be avilable from 20th March.
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 3/3/20
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