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

 

arcing, stilling, bending, gathering

WP of Binchois Arrangements

Milton Court, Guildhall School of Music and Drama (London, United Kingdom)

Britten Sinfonia/Huw Watkins

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arcing, stilling, bending, gathering

Melbourne Recital Centre (Melbourne, VIC, Australia)

Aura Go/Australian National Academy of Music/Tilman Robinson

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