Part 2

For you, what is the role and importance of structure in music?

Structure is what makes musical time intelligible. I don't necessarily mean a visible formal scheme — exposition, development, recapitulation, sixteen bars, eight bars. Structure can be much more subtle. It can be the distribution of energy, register, density, expectation and memory over time.

When I write for orchestra, structural thinking can operate on a very large scale because the instrumental resources allow enormous changes of perspective. With solo piano, structure may emerge from resonance, register or the recurrence of a small harmonic object. In a trio, part of the structure can be collective: three musicians sensing that an event has lasted long enough, or that something which happened five minutes earlier can now return.

Without structure, even beautiful material can become indifferent because nothing changes its significance. Structure allows one event to affect another. At the same time, I don't want the listener to have to recognise the architecture intellectually. 

Ideally you feel the form before you can explain it. You sense that something has accumulated, that a return matters, that a climax has been earned or that a silence arrives at exactly the moment when another sound would have been too much.

When structure works, I don't hear it as a scheme imposed on the music. I hear it in the particular weight each event acquires from its position in time.

Do you think that structure is an inherent quality of a piece or is it something our brain creates in the process of processing the music?

I think it exists in the relationship between the two.

A piece contains real relationships: proportions, repetitions, pitch hierarchies, rhythmic recurrences, registral contrasts. They are not imaginary. But structure only becomes experienced as structure when a listener begins grouping events, remembering them and forming predictions.

This is why the same sound can have a completely different structural function depending on what surrounds it. A chord can be an arrival, a departure, an interruption or almost nothing. Its physical properties may be identical, but the history we have constructed around it changes its meaning.

That is one of the ideas underneath Cornea. Perception is not a passive camera recording musical objects exactly as they are. Listening is an active process. Memory is constantly editing the present.

As composers, we cannot control exactly what another person will perceive, and I don't think we should want to. What we can do is create conditions in which certain perceptions become more probable. We can plant a memory, obscure it, bring it back later and allow the listener to realise retrospectively that something heard ten minutes ago was more important than it initially seemed.

So structure is neither entirely “in the music” nor entirely “in the brain”. It emerges from their encounter.

How did that manifest itself in the trio constellation in the studio and how did you collectively work on this aspect? 

In the trio, you can transform a musical object radically without changing the object itself. 

A figure played by the piano can remain identical while the bass moves from support to counterline. Haim can change from pulse to texture. The same harmony can suddenly feel unstable because it is placed in another register or surrounded by more silence. We can make a section feel larger without playing louder simply by changing the width of the musical space.

That was one of the most interesting parts of working with Mariusz and Haim. Their decisions were not merely additions to something I had written. They altered the meaning of the written information. 

Mariusz has a very melodic sense of the bass, so a line that might theoretically function as a foundation can become another narrative voice. Haim can create motion through colour and timing without automatically creating more activity. This allowed the music to breathe without becoming static.

We were therefore often dealing less with “what else should happen here?” and more with “what happens if we change the weight of what is already here?” I sometimes think of it like changing a lens. The object remains in the same place, but depth, focus and proportion change.

That idea connects the trio very directly to my work in other formats. Orchestration can do exactly the same thing on a larger scale. Electronic processing can do it by transforming the perceived distance or texture of a sound. A pianist can do it simply through touch and resonance.

The means are different, but the compositional question is the same.