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Commissioned by the BBC Proms 2012 for Sir Mark Elder and the Aldeburgh World Orchestra. Dedicated to Mark-Anthony Turnage.
This work was composed in 2012 and first performed on 29 July 2012 at the BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall, London by the Aldeburgh World Orchestra, conducted by Sir Mark Elder.
PROGRAMME NOTES
At The Speed of Stillness finds part of its inspiration in a surrealist poem by Dora Maar, ‘I rested in the arms of my arms’. The energy, sense of endless movement and of exhaustion encapsulated in the poem permeates the music. Important also is the play with paradoxical ideas, for example the contrary notion that something moving quicker than the human eye can detect may appear to be completely still: ‘The hummingbird motionless as a star’.
Harnessed to this energetic charge in the work are expressions of ideas that resulted from contemplation of Sizewell Nuclear Power Station in Leiston, in the east of England, which I drew on as a source of inspiration: a very different take on Benjamin Britten's landscape. I was mesmerised by the relentlessness of the structures; the constant shifts in perspective when chasing the power line across the countryside – restlessly in view, then out of view; the constant duality of the power lines – an underlying energy hidden and almost intimate, yet zinging with immense power. Another duality is found in the fragility that comes hand-in-hand with this amount of manufactured power: that it could stop momentarily or even end permanently.