Every Monday throughout 2023 I will be highlighting a different piece of music that I have either written or been closely involved with. And this week, prepare to be swept up in an avalanche of notes because it’s…


What’s it called?
Cascades.

What’s it from?
‘Miniatures’, my 2023 album of classical piano compositions.

What’s it all about?
Another purely abstract piece, this one’s really not ‘about’ anything in a literal sense. My concept for it, though, was to try something similar to Bach’s famous C major Prelude, where the keyboard plays a perfectly regular repetitive figure but which changes a few notes each time in order to move harmonically from chord to chord. Thus the music rocks up and down between the left and right hands, each of which is given 3 notes of the chord, and over the duration of the piece we are taken on a journey through all sorts of different harmonic permutations in a hypnotic whirlwind of pianistic colour.

Listen out for…
The alternation between major and minor chords, such as you can hear in the opening 8 bars (0:00-0:07) and which recurs over the course of the piece. Each time this happens, in the sheet music I have marked the major chord as ‘confident’ and the minor chord as ‘less’, so it’s as though the music starts off bold and positive but is continually having little crises of confidence. I also playfully reprise this idea in the very last chord, which is a jarring clash of both major and minor at the same time (1:59).

Another section I rather like is 0:37-0:47, where I start with a simple C major chord then change 1 note every couple of bars to warp it into a mysterious harmony consisting of C, F, B, E, A and D (all equally spaced a 4th apart*). Like this:
 

* Technically they’re not all a perfect 4th apart, but in a diatonic sense they’re equally spaced.

Find out more at…
www.michaelgrantmusician.com/miniatures