While They Were Devouring...

While They Were Devouring… is an eight-minute piece for solo piano written in Belgium in 2018 and premiered by Mathias Coppens at the Alba Nova Festival that June.

The title is the first half of a sentence whose second half the piece withholds. It is about appetite — the way attention is eaten, the way a person can be consumed by a room while everyone in it is busy with something else. The writing keeps the pianist’s two hands in different worlds: the left is a slow, heavy, almost ceremonial progression of chords that never varies its pace, a feast going on in the bass; the right is quick, nervous and fragmentary, picking at the upper register in small melodic scraps that are always interrupted before they can become a tune. Pedal holds the two together in a single haze. Twice the right hand stops entirely and the left simply continues, as though it had not noticed.

The ellipsis is the point. While they were devouring — what? — the piece does not say, and ends on the left hand, still eating.