The first single from my new album with Audrey Powne, “A Modicum of Hope”, has been released on Apple Music, Spotify and wherever you stream your music. We hope you enjoy this first glimpse into the album.
apple music: https://music.apple.com/jp/album/a-modicum-of-hope-single/1845390592
spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/6HmSsr2Z1pLBagLC7O9XtX?si=rW5ReFYHRCS6F2iszftR4w
I have written some words below for the occasion of the single’s release.
words on “A Modicum of Hope”
Audrey originally wrote A Modicum of Hope for the 2020 New York Festival of New Trumpet Music, but the first time we played it together was for a concert we did in 2022 entitled “home again, home again” at Tempo Rubato in Melbourne, Australia, which also featured another close collaborator of ours, Georgie Darvidis.
It’s actually the second part of a two-part suite, with the first part entitled “A Myriad of Dread”. These two pieces are affectionately referred to as AMOD and AMOH respectively, and as the copies of my piano sheet music only had those abbreviated titles, it took me a long time to get the actual titles right - I’ve mistitled them several different ways over the years: “A Myriad of Despair”, “A Measure of Hope”, “A Multitude of Disdain”…
The 2022 Tempo Rubato concert was the first time Audrey and I had played music of our own together for several years - I left Melbourne in 2015, and though I’d visit home more or less annually we didn’t get much chance to play together since that departure. Prior to this concert, we had talked about potentially making an album remotely in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was during this time that I wrote much of “And still, a resonance” at home on my upright piano. The remote album didn’t eventually come to fruition at that time, but the pieces found life as we rehearsed them for the first time in the days prior to the Tempo Rubato concert, and I was overjoyed to find that these tunes that I had written with Audrey in mind were on the exact wavelength as the tunes she had prepared, AMOD and AMOH.
I remember one of the first instructions Audrey gave me when playing AMOH for the first time was to “leave an uncomfortable amount of space” - this was in referral to the opening section, where the piano punctuates a series of 4-note trumpet phrases with carefully voiced septuplet arpeggios. The idea was to let these arpeggios ring out into the air until they were gone, and then give the silence that followed their disappearance the gravity it needed before continuing with the next trumpet phrase. When we play this tune, Audrey often plays this opening section directly into the piano strings - left resonant with a depressed sustain pedal - and what results is the most beautiful sounding of space, a reward for the act of intensive listening. This sense of space requires a physicality that makes it nearly impossible to replicate on a recording, but the version you hear on “And still, a resonance” I feel closely captures the spirit of it.
The other thing that moved me about AMOH was its dynamic range, as the piece then begins to pick up momentum towards its climax, which is a sprawling trumpet improvisation that starts over the septuplet motif and thunders into augmented chords with beefy bass octaves. AMOH begins with shafts of light through clouds, but ends ensconsed with it. It’s the penultimate track on “And still, a resonance”, and while AMOD and AMOH are complete experiences in and of themselves, I feel that AMOH lights the path for the final track on the album, “Like Dust” - the “happiest” track on the record - to shine.
Audrey and I spent most of our formative musical years in the same spaces - communities, ensembles, classes, live venues, cinemas - and the way we’ve spent all this time sharing the spectrum of both of our musical and artistic influences I believe has shaped who we are as musicians, as well as the kind of music making we do - whether it is leaving space for silence, or filling it with raucous sound. “A Modicum of Hope” is everything I love about our musical history, and while it does indeed fill me with hope for what’s next for us, that hope is far from a modicum - it’s precisely the opposite, whatever that is. A myriad, perhaps?
Marty Hicks
→ preorder “And still, a resonance”, out on November 1: https://martyhicks.bandcamp.com/album/and-still-a-resonance