Instrumentation
pno(=gtr) – 6 vln.3 vla.2 vcl.db – pre-recorded sounds
Availability
Score and parts in preparation
Programme Notes
October, 2012: At an exhibition in Jeu de Paume, Paris, I encounter two small films by
Sergei Eisenstein. The films capture fleeting reflections in glass shop windows. They
are equally mundane, intimate and mesmeric. I begin to imagine music with a similar
interplay of chance collisions and transparent layers.
April, 2014: I am listening to a lot of pedal steel music, immersed in complex, warm
sounds which seem to draw away with blurred edges; an ungraspable articulation of
space in sound.
August, 2016: I have two images on my desk: a photograph of my childhood garden
extending into bushland (as viewed from our family piano) and another from the Blue
Mountains in 2015. The horizons are indiscernible, but the eye seeks nonetheless to
reach beyond. My gaze doesn’t settle.
July, 2022: I have a small fragment of music, the strands of which have been unpicked
and rewoven to create many different sonic impressions – diffractions of the original. I
am contemplating curved forms: the arcing movement of the spheres and the tender
elliptical embrace of a mother gathering a child into her arms.
arcing, stilling, bending, gathering opens sparsely and quietly. The ensemble is
arranged into smaller groups – satellites or layers – of sound heard only in part. Glacial
chords and floating tapestries of sound mingle, the focus keeps shifting. arcing, stilling,
bending, gathering is composed entirely out of different sonic impressions of the first
few bars of its final movement, converging for a moment in ever-evolving
combinations. It is a very personal contemplation of the moments of kinship and
tenderness that balance the immensity of the world we inhabit.
LI