Blitz
- Instrumentation
- Cello, Piano
- Composed
- 1988
- Publisher
- Canadian Music Centre (unpublished, printed by CMC), RSN 10843, call no. MI 3213 C277bl; manuscript score 33 pp., original at CMC Montreal
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About this piece
Nicole Carignan, a Montreal composer who studied composition with André Prévost and later taught intercultural education at UQAM, wrote Blitz in 1987 and 1988. Much of the handwritten score runs on a timeline in seconds instead of barlines. The piano opens 'très fort' with a quick flourish, then holds clusters pressed with the forearms on black and white keys and clusters rolled with the fists, while the cello answers with long glissandi that swing back and forth and climb toward the top of the string, pizzicato chords and harmonics. Later passages settle into measured writing, with the cello's ringing double stops over running piano sixteenths, before a white-key cluster glissando and short accented chords close the piece.
Technical overview
Written in bass clef with time-space notation, so much of the pacing is measured in seconds rather than bars. The cello part combines wide glissandi starting from the bridge, pizzicato chords mixed with natural harmonics, and later double stops left to ring against fast piano figuration.