Michele Nobler is a contemporary composer I have had the pleasure of meeting through social media. He was kind enough to share his compositions with me, so I thought I’d write a blog post about his music!
An Album From the Heart
Nobler’s piano album “Suspended Souls” is a beautiful collection of modern musical art that combines piano, electronics, and minimalism to tell a story. I asked him to tell me a little bit about this album:
“The entire album was built around an emotional center that can be summarized by a famous Heinrich Heine phrase: “Where words end, music starts.” The stories of these pieces are based on feelings that are hardly expressible in words. These incommunicable truths emerge through music.
“The ‘story we will never tell’ is an inscrutable sensation that is inaccessible through words. These stories remain suspended inside of us, but they do not disappear; rather, they condition us daily, giving meaning to our lives.
“While it is true that ‘music expresses nothing but herself’ (Stravinsky), the choice to organize time in a specific way and the decision to give it a well-defined structure leads to a sound organization that becomes the mirror of what we feel. Although this opens up a gap of incommunicability by taking away the certainty of what each of us feels listening to the same music, it gives us an infinite freedom to change the emotional image reflected in the musical mirror. I would complete Stravinsky’s phrase: ‘Music expresses nothing but herself’ with ‘nothing could mean
“The emotional nature of music is distinguished by infinite interpretations of the different psychology of individual listeners. The message has the same sound for everyone, but it comes with different meanings. This communicative discrepancy transforms the composer’s original message into several other messages, and this is precisely the richness of the musical language: to say much more than the creator’s original intention.”
With that in mind, let’s dive into some of the music from the album!
Suspended Souls
A journey through the piano: my music tells the emotions and intensity of life.
Michele Nobler
Analysis and Inspiration
Suspended Souls opens with a rumbling chord cluster in the bass. This chord cluster influences the rest of the piece; listen for some extremely low notes that appear every so often!
After a lullaby-esque introduction (and some musical foreshadowing in the extremely high notes combined with the arpeggiated motif), the main theme begins at 1:16. This theme is explored and expanded through minimalistic arpeggios, melodic leaps, and mood shifts.
The simple melody [in Suspended Souls] always moves around the same theme, and the tension, while it grows, cannot get free from the C minor key that commands the whole piece! This rising dramatic tension falls on itself, dreaming of the melancholy and perhaps sometimes slightly baroque-like themes…
Nobler
In fact, I asked Nobler about the inspiration behind this piece. Here’s what he said:
“I do not like to talk about my inspirations, not because they are secrets, but because I’m afraid of conditioning the music lover with my interpretation. But this time I will make an exception, hoping that each of us is free to hear what he wants in music.
“The piece Suspended Souls is about that always lost, unrepeatable, suspension in time. It speaks of a forgotten truth, which imprisons us in a way of being linked to that truth. It slowly recalls the awareness of this past, not tragic for its content, but for the prison of the
Kim’s Variations I
Analysis and Inspiration
Kim’s Variations I is another work on the album “Suspended Souls”. It opens with a theme of rolled chords that appear throughout the work. The mood shifts at 0:23 with an 8th-note ostinato in the bass, and this idea carries through the rest of the piece.
Listen for the sweet melody at 1:26 that builds to a climax (after reintroducing the chords from the beginning at 2:07). Kim’s Variations I draws on a beautiful theme, expanding it with arpeggios and color as the harmonies subtly change.
Nobler said of the inspiration behind Kim’s Variations I:
“Ok, the first question that is usually asked about this piece is: ‘Who is Kim?’ I like to leave a little mystery!
“The idea of these variations came from listening to musicians who improvised arrangements of some movie soundtracks on the accordion, making the arrangements more exciting than the piece they were improvising on. So, I also began to play with variations, looking for new ways to develop the same harmony. In this research I felt an ’emotional seesaw’ that brought me up and down, growing, resulting in sweet melodies and variations that run like a game! Yes, the variations were born playing games of love with music!”
And before we finish this post, here’s one last thought from Nobler about his album:
“The first thing I would like [you] to feel [when listening to my album] is free. The most beautiful thing about music is freedom! The second … well, it would be very nice if my music, besides being listened to, inspired other people at the piano as I have been in the past listening to other creators. That’s why I decided to publish the Suspended Souls scores book because even if only one person will feel the need to play them, it would be a great joy!”
*love*
I’m so glad you like it!!
hello Kathryn, thanks for sharing your exellent music your friend Raul.
I’m so glad you like it ♥️