Pianoforte (June 2022 – present)

In May 2022, I found myself with access to a piano for the first time in three years.  My history with the piano has been a long one, delight, terror, flow, interruption, beauty, loss. 

I left my piano behind in England, and when eventually after a global pandemic my belongings returned to me, I found myself convinced that my piano should stay behind.

After a long adventure of homelessness, I found myself, by a series of uncanny moments, in a certain apartment.  Not long after, my neighbours offered me the chance to play their piano when they were away in the summer:  I left behind a small Knight upright reminiscent of my primary school and sat down in Sweden at a Steinway grand.

All summer I played one piece, every day: Divenire

‘Becoming’.

I recorded myself.

‘Pianoforte’ grows out of that summer of playing and a week-long residency in Guest Studio 3 of Konstepidemin (June 2022), in which I discovered a unity in my work of playing, painting, poetry and pencil.  A deeper self was emerging, who integrated new, lost and stolen elements of my being.  The being was in the music of the piano, in the playing, in the mystery of percussion and rhythm making the music of water, of flow. 

I am not sure where this project might go.

A longing emerged to revisit the pieces I used to play – the selves I used to be. 

A sudden alertness took hold – I noticed new things, things I could not have seen as a child.  I noticed how works I played were by men, how I’d not heard of a woman composer, although my teachers were women.  I noticed how my own musicality was blocked, how I might have composed, but didn’t really, or made my own work, but, silence.

All at once it was clear.  I would revisit the terrain of my childhood piano playing by replaying all the pieces of my earlier musical education (composed almost exclusively by men), but now as a mature adult feminist woman, with new insights and new access to and expansiveness of feeling.  And from this playing, I would explore what it had meant to me to live my musicality on a terrain that so little belonged to me, and from that I would write, play, paint, pencil…

In October 2022, I arrived at a turning point.  I no longer had access to the summer’s piano.  But I had made a new friend.  I asked for and was given the keys to his studio.  So now I would be embarking on my project on the grand piano of a male classically educated concert pianist.  The story took on new ironies and new depths.  I was literally venturing onto patriarchal terrain. 

Kulturnatta (Culture Night), October 2022) in Gothenburg saw me open my studio and display the work so far.  It was also a threshold.  From now on I was in the project properly, and I started to replay the pieces of my childhood and see where they took me.

At 13festival, a performance festival hosted at Konstepidemin, I gave a performance of readings of extracts from the novel in progress, interspersed with sound recordings, of reperformances of the childhood pieces on the pianoforte of my friend. 

In the summer of 2023, I took part in the International Piano Summer School at Chateau d’Aix in the South of France, under the tuition of Paul Roberts and Maria Razumovskaya.

And all the time, a novel might or might be taking shape, I’m still not sure.