Conrad Winslow & Liam Byrne: A Likeness

Conrad Winslow, composition and piano Liam Byrne, viola da gamba Full score available on @ScoreFollower “The term “idiomatic” always assumes an idiom, which in instrumental music nearly always refers to the scales, articulation, and phrasing needed to fluently perform the hits of the canon. In this unusual duet for bass viola da gamba and modern piano, however, Liam Byrne and I first had to determine the idiom of the situation. So A Likeness developed slowly through workshops in 2021, which allowed us the time to develop a gestural and harmonic rhetoric for our very different instruments. I defined harmonic spaces for us to lean into mutual resonances, and a lexicon of harmonic shadows, echoes and imitative gestures that enabled our instruments to speak naturally, idiomatically, to one another. Or one might think of two painters attempting with dissimilar brushes to capture the essence of a subject, each acquiring the ability to capture the likeness of someone through minimal gesture. The introspective icy viol and the massive industrial piano face each other to catch reflected glimpses of a ghost.“ --Conrad Winslow “Conrad and I decided that the way we wanted to bring this piece into the world was to make a film of it ourselves, so in March 2023 we set up five cameras and a load of microphones in Conrad’s apartment and spent four days experimenting with angles and perspectives to create a sort of DIY videographic self-portrait of the piece. The video footage you see and the audio you hear are always from the same take, with only a very few exceptions of smaller gestures that were synced during editing.“ --Liam Byrne