Martin Arnold's album Flax is a sparse 80-minute piano monologue. Performed by Kerry Yong and recorded by Simon Reynell of the record label another timbre, the piece was premiered and documented at the University of Huddersfield in October 2022. My advice: listen to Flax with a friend, for the conversation that the music will spark, and the mutual accountability to finish listening to the album in its entirety.
Originally commissioned by Philip Thomas, Flax was written during the pandemic. And it feels like 2020. The world has stopped. All is quiet, still. Notes appear on one long horizontal scroll, with no clear beginning, no end. Beautiful major-7th chords appear for a moment then get put away by muffling felt, like a broken promise. Every note requires so much effort. The keys feel too large, like stairs, or at least the length of a forearm.
Yet the recording doesn't betray the sound of the effort required to play the piano. There are no incidental pedal sounds, partly because the pedal doesn't come in really until the very end (surprise!), and there is no sound of breath or other movement, as there was in Opus, the last solo piano concert recording of Ryuichi Sakamoto. Clean, dry, the recording of Flax is masterful, pairing exquisitely with the virtuosic performance by Yong.
Yong plays each note with a perfectly consistent sound. The piano is bright but no note is loud. No note is quiet. Nothing is phrased. This is monstrously hard to do, as Yong must play in a way that doesn't encourage the resonance of the piano. Perhaps a flat finger in the middle of the key, with a hard-ish press, a slow lift. Whatever Arnold communicated in the score encouraged Yong to be the anti-instinctual pianist, to forget voicing, forget having a voice at all, which perhaps is the greatest accomplishment: maintaining an objectivity and a trust in this aesthetic.
So what is the aesthetic of Flax? Here are some observations. I have no doubt a live concert of Flax would be compelling – though the dramaturgy of the work is not dynamic, the human presence and withholding of such committed, lost wanderings would be fascinating. ‘Nice’ harmonies appear like accidents, pointing to some other genre, like a slowed-down and broken-up jazz improvisation. The two hands often have different characters, and any aberration seems like a chasm. For example, a minor second appears in the beginning, then not again for half an hour. Was the first a mistake? Given the intensity of the playing, probably not. But the continual posturing towards ‘pretty’ and the immediate denial require us to constantly switch our mode of listening, which becomes exhausting. Flax is demanding, perhaps for the sake of being demanding, saying your expectations are meaningless, beauty is meaningless, understanding is meaningless.
Despite (or because of) its structural nihilism, there is an impressiveness and grandeur to the project. Like a large Cy Twombly painting, the pianist draws on a gigantic piece of paper with giant crayons. For this reason, I am curious about the notation – to know how much to attribute to the intuition of the pianist, to allocate intention fairly between composer and performer. It's a bit bothersome not knowing. Is Flax heavily notated like an Evan Johnson piece, the sonic result of which is similarly hinting but never revealing? Or is it written in free time like a John Cage graphic?
Towards the end of the 80-minute work, dyads appear, then clusters, then the left hand has single notes – gestures we haven't seen before present themselves. Only if you have been paying attention, however. Like the floating collagen threads that float across the vitreous film of your eyes – there when you choose to look at them. Have I heard anything like Flax before? Is there a limit to expansiveness? Does Arnold have hope for humanity? No good answers, but I am very grateful that Flax inspired me to ask these questions.
