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Longworth, Peter: Neko

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Advanced. My solo trumpet piece, Neko: Meowing, Pacing, Purring was composed for Alfonso González Barquín who had asked me to write something for him to perform at the 2019 Fukushima International Music Festival. The festival’s theme for that year was The Cat, and, as a cat-lover myself, I was rather taken with his proposal. The opening section of Neko imagines a trotting cat repeatedly negotiating a flight of stairs through a series of nimble descending figures which are being ever re-imagined. The leggiero, staccato character of this material - which is heard in the clear, upper-middle register of the trumpet - symbolises the weightless appearance of a cat in motion, whilst the “gear shifts” are heard in the sporadic appearance of shorter notes that call for crisp, double-tongued articulation. Within this opening section - and, indeed, throughout the entire work - we also hear periodic acciaccature which allude to the quirky tendency that cats have to twitch irritably or distractedly. Compounding the overall sense of unsettledness is the employment of irregular metres which make for ever-shifting emphases in the music so as to create what we may hear almost as glitches in the overall momentum, as if a cat is bounding forwards or taking the stairs two at a time! This trotting-derived music is revisited in the work’s final section as a form of recapitulation, suggesting a loose ternary structure for the piece. Here, though, the gracefulness of the opening is abandoned, as a faster tempo and employment of the trumpet’s strident higher register transforms the material into something altogether more skittish. In writing this episode I had in mind the short bursts of hyperactivity that see cats tear wildly around a room - as if at war with themselves - whilst the conclusive, ascending flourish of notes imagines a feline springing abruptly from an accommodating lap. Standing in opposition to these outer sections of the work is a slower central episode which explores the more deliberate side to a cat’s movements: the swaggering purpose with which they strut and stalk. Similar to their faster gaits these more sedate motions also appear to incorporate gentle changes of pace and sometimes even brief pauses as a paw remains lifted for a split-second longer than seems natural. I sought to capture this amusing combination of deliberateness and indecision through a quasi-march which is regularly unbalanced by brief halts and rhythmic stumbles. Peter Longworth

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