3 pieces for quintet, commissioned by Achrome Ensemble
- The moon in my watersong
- Stele
- Black Waltz
The title is taken from a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann.
Hanging above the sounds: the harmony of waves in motion,Always the surface shifts towards another destination.(Black Waltz)All the compositional processes seemed to converge with the poetic in this piece. The starting points were quite different, the material gleaned from experimenting with a series of chords, textures and time and a desire to communicate more directly may have their origins in the fact that all of us were locked away from one another for such an extraordinary period in our lives. During this time, concrete musical ideas began to take shape and I started to assemble the pieces. The editing process was equally important, the second movement takes this to the extreme, most of the music composed was
erased and what remains is a distilled essence.
The first movement is concerned with ebb and flow, strident music gives way to lyricism (watersongs), drama dissolves into limpid calm but moves towards another destination. The second movement is stark, bleak, some kind of memorial. The third movement appears to be following a similar path to the first but veers off and the musical ideas begin to link more closely with the poem, compositionally speaking.
https://soundcloud.com/composersedition/towards-another-destination?si=016a58b7323847a1a39a4a9dfca7023a
