Kodok
Notes
Kodok was composed for the George W. Welch ensemble and premiered at the Purcell Room, London in 1989.
The first section emerges surprisingly from the tuning up of the players, creating a more than usually relaxed initial impression. The idea is to lure the listener in to what will become an increasingly strange experience. This first section is heavily indebted to Javanese Gamelan. I was playing in the South Bank Gamelan Orchestra at the time and its patterns and approach to structure suffused my musical thinking. However, this gamelan piece is already slightly odd. The scale pattern used, with its atypical key signature of a single Eb, evokes neither slendro nor pelog tunings, but rather an unusual (and equal tempered) mode of T-T-ST-T-ST-T-T or W-W-H-W-H-W-W rooted on G. Of course the timbres of the instruments are mostly far from gamelan too.
At the heart of the piece is the piano, which recomposes the piano part from my 1987 piece Catalogue de grenouilles (Catalogue of Frogs). "Kodok" is an onomatopoiec Indonesian word for toad (I remember being entranced by the background sounds of frogs and toads singing on early field recordings of gamelan muisc). The piano chords are treated colourisitically, rather than for their harmonic function, and do not sit within the prevailing mode. Rather they take on the character of mildly dissonant gong strokes. The piano provides a structuring function through the ground bass left hand G-Eb-A-B, which is derived from Uranus in Holst's suite The Planets (the reason for this relates to Jean-Pierre Brisset's writings, and his insistence that frogs urinate through their anus - "ure anus" - which gives rise to the name of the father of the gods, Uranus). Despite its formal importance, however, the piano is mostly buried within the texture of the music.
The gamelan section starts to break down a little over half way through the piece and other material that is culturally and harmonically located elsewhere begins to intrude. This becomes more obviously Western. Most instruments in the ensemble are featured in solos, as the music goes on a strange and chromatically rich journey. Eventually it arrives at an evocation of the spirit of Erik Satie, before settling back into a kind of gamelan ending.