Arpisms (2025) for flute

After three decades of neglect, I have returned to the solo flute idiom. After the original Flute Tetralogy, comprising vier darmstädter aphorismen (1986-89); dé/ployé (1987); sulle scale della Fenice (1986–89); and closing lemma (1987–91), I felt that I had pretty much exhausted my investment in the instrument, and since then I had only featured the flute in ensemble works. Perhaps enough time has passed, however, because In recent years I have returned my attention to the flute, and have already completed my third revisitation. My old friend Laura Chislett has already worked on the first of these, Dawn is a girl, removing her necklace of stars, but the first she will actually play in public is the most recent, Arpisms, and her concert will take place at the Hayes Street Studio in Sydney’s Neutral Bay, at 4pm on the afternoon of Sunday May 31 2026. Other composers on the program include Petrassi, Koechlin, the ex-East German Siegfried Matthus, and Michael Finnissy who celebrates his 80th birthday this year. (Happy birthday, Michael!) Coincidentally, I particularly like the music of all these composers. Should be a good evening! Wish I could be there…

For those who cannot get to Neutral Bay (or even Sydney!), Laura is planning to record the work at some point, and I will ensure that gets uploaded here as soon as it is available.

Arpisms is based on three gloriously strange descriptive words from poems by Hans (Jean) Arp, rainpagodas, flowersphinx, and withered bells. I created three separate skeins of music, each deriving its character from one of these words: ecstatic showing-off (rainpagodas), painfully constrained introverted microtonal melody (flowersphinx), and to balance, entropic disintegrations (withered bells), and threaded them together to form a single musical arc.