If You Were Here

Notes on a friendship

In life, there are moments when, looking back, you realize the events you experienced happened so spontaneously and serendipitously that they formed a kind of roadmap to your present life and self. Without those seemingly random occurrences, your life would be entirely different.

In 2014, I had set out to London to attend the Royal College of Music, after applying to over a dozen graduate programs for composition. Of all the schools that I applied for, the only one from which I received an interview, let alone an acceptance, was my top choice, the Royal College of Music.

I packed my life into two suitcases and moved across the Atlantic, landing in student accommodation in the heart of the “City of London,” surrounded by some of the city’s most recognizable skyscrapers. Stepping off the Central Line train during the lunch hour rush, I had no idea that within days my life would take a turn away from any plans I thought I had.

At the welcome party for first-year RCM students in our building, I stood in a random spot while the staff gave their opening remarks. When the speech ended, I turned to the person next to me—a complete stranger—and struck up a conversation. That stranger, Francisco, a Portuguese pianist, became one of my best friends in London. Within an hour, I found myself surrounded by a dozen Portuguese students, happy to be able to speak their native language.

Francisco, from northern Portugal, decided it would be fun to teach me Portuguese. His “lessons” consisted of random words like “rapaz” and “rapariga” (boy and girl), “frigorífico” (refrigerator), and northern slang such as “pash!” In the middle of one of these impromptu lessons, I met Vera Fonte.

Vera, a natural teacher, took over from Francisco, showing me how to form simple sentences, conjugate verbs, and practice speaking—even at my most basic level. Eleven years later, I’ve been living in Lisbon for almost six years and am still speaking Portuguese, thanks to Vera’s patience and gift for teaching.

But meeting Vera brought more than just language lessons. Vera was also a pianist working on her PhD at RCM. She was looking for composer to collaborate with. Her studies were on memorization and she was seeking to have a composer write a piece for her that made use of “extended techniques” for the piano, or playing the piano in unorthodox was, such as making use of the inside strings. The piece also had to provide a memorization challenge in how it was structured. I was immediately interested.

RCM had a program called Contemporary Music in Action that paired performers and composers. Through this, Vera and I created If You Were Here, a piece inspired by the spacious, resonant opening of Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” from their album Wish You Were Here. Its famous four-note guitar motif became the basis of the composition. In her thesis, Vera describes it:

“The performer expands the sonic world of the piano by plucking and playing glissandos on the strings, by resonating their harmonics and by introducing objects, such as a metal chain on the soundboard. The resulting piano resonance mimics the sound characteristics of an electric guitar.”

The piece also drew on the influence of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos, which my composition teacher, Alison Kay, had encouraged me to study. Not only did the sound world overlap with that of the Pink Floyd song, in how the piano was utilized, it also expanded my conception of what piano playing could be. I had been exposed to pieces that made use of extended techniques and “prepared piano” (altering the sound of the piano by placing objects on or in between the strings) before, but Crumb’s way of writing mesmerized me. It wasn’t just the sounds themselves, but how he incorporated them into his piano writing. As a composer and as a pianist these Makrokosmos resonated with me.

Thanks to Vera, If You Were Here is my most-performed piece to date, with performances in the UK, Portugal, and Serbia. She has presented it at conferences in Germany and Iceland. For a composer, few things match the joy of knowing your music is being played. Even if it’s only one performer, it matters. The amount of work that Vera has put into this piece over the past decade has made all the difficult work put into writing such a piece well worth it.

You can listen to the piece below as well as links to some of my favorite movements of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos.