Lani

Description

Whether its title is a name or some other word cannot be told from the work: Lani is a piano piece Ravi Kumar wrote in 2005, and no reliable information has been found about how it came to be written. What follows describes it as far as the score data allows.

Its range, from B1 to G-sharp 5, is just under four octaves, narrow by the standard of Kumar's pieces on this site, and keeps to the central part of the keyboard. It lasts about three and a half minutes with 674 notes, a little over three a second on average. No key or time signature is recorded, but the density is moderate and restrained, and the movement of the notes is easy to follow.

This intermediate piece is not driven by fast passagework, so the quality of each note's sound and the timing of the breaths between phrases shape how it comes across. Listen through at normal speed to grasp the flow, then slow the playback only for the spots that need it and check them with A-B looping. How far to join the sound with the pedal is another place to experiment. On a 61-key instrument only the lowest note, B1, falls just outside the range, and raising it an octave fits every note.

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