Victor Spiegel evocation Solo Piano

Here are elegant, passionate, fiery, introspective, original piano compositions that are syncopated and jazzy. Here is music that travels like a magic carpet over vast distances, across sultry seas, dazzling deserts, and dense green rain forests.
Victor Spiegel has gathered together these structured improvisations written over the past 20 years. Improvisational structures, such as raga, jazz, taxim, and flamenco, are ways to create a form that can hold the substance of the moment- like vases, rooms, hearts, and minds.

For a special web section featuring pieces that did not make it into the album, thoughts about the compositions, and photos and music scores. To enter the Evocation extra page, click here.

photo by William Giles

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Victor Spiegel Music
1216 Burnett Street
Berkeley, CA 94702
USA

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Next solo piano performances:

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Hey, Victor! What are you going to play at these concerts? Program

"A place to rest your heart and mind in this warm CD that brings integrity and substance back to "easy listening."
At last, a new age musician who recognizes the basic need for musical structure in music. With his warm and heartfelt jazzy style, you'll find a place to rest in these songs. Unlike so many new age piano CDs that set you adrift in a musical river and never come back for you, he will take you on a relaxing, mesmerizing, yet musically intelligent journey of peace, respite and focused. With a real ear for ballads and memorable melodies full of heart and substance, he knows that when we want to kick back and relax with soothing music and a glass of red, we also want to feel all of life present in that moment; the emotion and beauty of life that only music can capture and reflect. "
TDT from CDbaby

The solo piano music of Victor Spiegel

MP3 snips:
How Many Eyes
Sunrise on the Blue Nowhere
Taxim
E Raga
Spain
American Gamelan
Soon Enough
C Raga
Shekinah

"The piano," says Victor, "can be many instruments, depending on how it's played. In American Gamelan Indonesian music seeps into me and blends with my American experiences and becomes a metallaphone orchestra, a gamelan. I wondered what would happen if you combined blues and a traditional 5-tone Gamelan scale. What resulted for me was the trance state inherent in Balinese music mixing with the blues."

For the ragas Victor studied sitar, North Indian music and composition with several master teachers. "Through my teachers I learned the power of the interval (the distance between two notes). Each interval has its own physical and emotional quality. The E Raga has a scale going up that's different from the one going down. This creates tension, gives it strange edges, and pulls inward. The Raga in C has more whole steps and creates more rounded edges; it is brighter, open and outward. I use bass notes to emulate a tamboura (the drone), and suggest the note stretching and single line of a sitar, with the right hand.

"How Many Eyes is in an American folk-song style. It hit me one day that each person sees life and experiences life from their own eyes, and that our own sight is uniquely our own. No one sees exactly what we see. This seems to be true for every aspect of life.

"Sunrise on the Blue NoWhere recreates my experience of crossing the Pacific in a sailboat from Maui to Los Angeles. The experiences are still vivid in my mind. We had every kind of weather: from wild storm to total calm, a full moon with milky clouds reflected in a milky ocean, and there was the morning that I came on deck to find intense infinite blue both below and above us. Being on that little boat in a big ocean put my life into a new perspective. This is a musical postcard from that time and place.

"Taxim is based on a Turkish improvisational form in a mode in B [B, C#, D#, E, F#, G, A, B]. Usually this type of music is performed on a string instrument such as Oud, Tar, or Setar. Persian and Turkish music have a highly developed tonality that, again, is impossible to illustrate on a piano. There are 5 steps between one of our whole steps. Our ears aren't used to such fine tonal distinctions, and so I do the best I can given our barbaric instruments.

"In Spain the first section oscillates between two keys that remind me of the East and West. An Arabic mode bridges the two scales. The first part is like the sparks of life, its passions and desires. The next part is interior, quiet, recalling a clear night with stars and a soft heartbeat. The piano takes on the qualities of Flamenco guitar.

"Soon Enough is a lyrical, structured improvisation owing some of its feeling to the 19th century composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler has a way with the orchestra that seems to give each instrument a character in a play. He also wrote superb, haunting melodies, with contrasting emotions.

"Shekinah is the only selection on this album that I've overdubbed, playing dumbek (dhoom'-bek), a frame drum, and finger cymbals. There is a gradual increase of tempo until all the instruments are playing. In the Jewish tradition Shekinah is the presence of blessing and grace."

Victor Spiegel Bio