published on
Clare Spollen, piano; Anne Yin Han, violin; Evie Hilyer-Ziegler, violin; Freda D'Souza, violin; James Creed, chamber organ.
From 'Six Studies', available through Sawyer Editions
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The pieces in this collection ['Six Studies'] are studies, of a sort, and all written in 2021 or 2022. Along with most other things I’ve produced in the same period, there’s an unintended, relentless sentimentality to them – inevitable, I suppose, if working with diatonic clusters. They’re all very simple, and, with the exception of Piano and Accompaniment, aren’t really “compositions” so much as demonstrations of what instruments are busy doing while we might be busy thinking about other things. That’s not to ignore a performer, and really it’s the opposite: these pieces are unconstructed, they are timbre, they begin as studies of (for instance) the piano and end as studies of particular fingers at a particular piano, which is much more interesting. Piano and Accompaniment seems an outlier, perhaps, as a piece with more moving parts, but it isn’t – it’s the same concerns for ensemble, with some very faint shaping from me.
Thanks to: Kory, Clare, Anne, Freda, Evie, Scott, Amber, Katie, Meghan, Mia, Fernando, Joy and Ben, and thanks for listening.
- Genre
- experimental