Ambience is a collection of ten original contemporary chill tunes for solo piano. Back in January 2025 with half an hour to spare, I sat down at my piano and opened Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues at page one and had a bit of a thrash through the first few pages. Inspiration struck, and a few weeks later, I had a new album of new work scribbled down. I then had to work out how to play it.
Prelude To An Inspiration
So the opener is an homage to the daddy of harmony, Bach senior, with a modern twist. JSB is the inspiration for both the first piece to get penned and the rest of the pieces that quickly followed.
I have no doubt that anyone with any actual academic credibility could look at the score and tear it apart with X-rated slashings of red biro to highlight the parallel fifths and octaves, and who knows however many other rules I’ve broken. I don’t care. I might well have started out well intentioned, but then quickly moved to follow a combination of my fingers and ears until I was sufficiently comfortable with both the resulting harmonic progression, tune, and let’s not beat around the bush here, playability.
It’s not Bach, and it’s not really anything like Bach. But it feels a bit like Bach when you’re playing it.
Having set the stylistic scene with my prelude, I consciously didn’t want to repeat it by writing another half a dozen of the same thing. I did however want to keep the collection of tunes broadly in the same sort of acoustic envelope. To that end, I set my focus in and around the chill zone and aimedfor Satie-simple tunes with rippling movement in the accompaniment, mostly at lowish or ambient levels. I didn’t want to constrain the period to just baroque, and let myself introduce whatever came to mind on each track.
Acoustic Mirriors
Back before WWII, boffins poured a few tons of concrete into weird concave shapes that the intrepid explorer can still hunt out on the south east coast of England. These Acoustic Mirrors were designed to capture and concentrate sound waves from across the English Channel, working a bit like the Whispering Gallery in St Pauls, but somewhat more deliberately as an early warning system of something wicked this way comes.
This piece is about listening for something in the quiet.
Between The Squalls
A jazzy little number about eddies in the wind and what happens in the gaps between.
February
I was trying to convey an air of chilliness with this one. Sparse and empty with the tune in the right hand alternating between pinpricks of something icy and little flurries of something etherally cold. Maybe with the low sun shining through it weakly from different angles .
Embers
I remember sitting around the camp fire well into the evening at cub and scout camp as a youngster. Once the sun went down, it got cold, even in the summer because of course we were all used to living indoors. We’d all edge closer to the heat listening to “scary” stories , watching the fire move around the pit under the heavy burnt-through logs and growing ash like some slow dragon glowing dull red. Sometimes we’d toast things (really badly) on sticks. Too hot to get close enough to do the cooking process justice, we’d alternate between badly charred and raw everything. And all the time there were sparks leaping randomly up from the embers like animated fireflies, whispering or whistling, maybe landing on your leg…. Somehow we all survived.
Freezing Fog
More November than February: these are the chill mists that envelope the car on those quiet dark roads. Driving in proper dense fog is draining enough, but then there’s the threat of windscreen white out just because you drive into a pocket of ever so slightly colder air.
On Shore Breeze
When the land is warmer than the sea, the wind comes on shore. And keeps coming. But then our Bristish Isles’ shores are chaotic when it comes to weather patterns.
I had the fortune of working for a few years as a IT consultant with the European Weather service, EUMETSAT, where my meterology knowledge was drammatically improved by working both on processing satellite imagery of clouds and alongside some absolute top notch cloud nerds who would often just stop mid-sentence and just gaze out the window at something high in the sky that suddently caught their eye.
Despite all the chaos (ie. jazzy bit), the on shore breeze keeps coming back.
Pinball
Thanks here to Dimitri Shostakovich. I had a super short piece of his to do for my grade 4 piano way back in the eighties. Can’t remember what it was called, but it was not only my introduction to him, but I can still remember how it goes today. Pinball is a bit like it, albeit probably grade 6 version because of all the additional chromaticism.
Open Air Gym
This one is a nod to Eric Satie and his Gymnopedie. Still don’t know what one of those is…. does anyone? Thought I’d have a go at writing something in the style and it kind of works.
A New Flow
Users of the Steinberg scoring software Dorico will be cheesily aware that I had run out of words for my latest piece, but having called the draft A New Flow, it stuck because it kind of fitted.
Players
Ambience performed by Steve Chowne.
Mixed and Mastered by Luca Zara.
Steve Chowne Music 