With its origins in a game of Bullet Chess, blitz, my composition for solo piano, interprets lightningquick chess moves by loosely mapping the pieces, the board, and the moves into various parameters that serve as source materials used in the composition. (According to the U.S. Chess Federation, Blitz Chess, also known as Speed Chess, 5-minute Chess, Lightning Chess (2-minute), and Bullet Chess (1-minute) is a variant defined as a single, sudden death time control from 1 to 10 minutes.) So you see that Bullet Chess, which is played for one minute only, is much faster than Blitz Chess, which can be from 3 to 15 minutes. Blitz and Bullet Chess, by the way, are good at teaching pattern recognition. My own adventures with chess began at age 7, taught by my grandmother Mimi, the Southeastern Women’s Champion for a number of years.
In general, white piano keys and extreme high register represent the white chess pieces; black keys and extreme low register represent the black pieces. The center of the piano keyboard corresponds to the center of the chessboard, where power struggles initiate and often play out. The 64 squares on the chessboard are mapped to 64 pitches. Also, the ranks for each side are mapped to single pitches for rank 1, dyads for rank 2, triads, for rank 3, and so on.
Each of the 8 major pieces (rook, knight, bishop on king and queen-side, and king and queen) is assigned one or more pitches according to its file (a-h) at the start of the game and the rank (1 – 8) that it occupies. As the white pieces advance down files on the board, and activity increases toward the middle ranks, the music moves from high register to middle register on the piano. The black pieces are treated similarly but move from low to middle register. Pawns are relatively free agents. As you might imagine, things become quickly complicated!
Here’s an example. As I’ve mentioned, in addition to having ranks control the pitches, the selection of pitches also depends on the pieces being moved, where they move from, and how they interact with the opponent. For instance, F4, known as the Bird’s Opening, is the first move in the Bullet Chess game that I drew upon for source material. In this move, the king bishop’s pawn, situated on file f and rank 2, moves from the second rank to the fourth rank. Thus, in the composition, dyads and tetrachords with pitches mapped to these ranks and files are prominent at the beginning of the piece.
I’m grateful to Vicki Ray for giving me the opportunity to write the piece for her, and for her blazing performance on the Piano Spheres concert premiere at Zipper Hall, Los Angeles, October 28, 2014.