for  flute/altoflute (1982)

This work is available from United Music Publishing

If anyone is unable to obtain a copy of this score within a reasonable time please contact me and I can supply a PDF.

I have a soft spot for this work. I hear in it the young (27) me grappling with the problem of local against global structure, and how to extend both to piece-length scale – with partial success. I learnt, of course, that these two parameters also need to be integrated for a work to have the kind of unity I have always sought: that realisation was to enrich future pieces. And then, I was having to confront the problem inherent in monody: what constitutes linear material? Or, how does one make intervallic thinking meaningful?†. I had, in previous works, sidestepped this issue by making the vertical alignment of events provide information, or, as in Topologies for piano, tried assembling material with numerological patterning to create resemblances. Both were acceptable ways of generating music, but even then I was dissatisfied with the results; the pieces seemed to me one-dimensional, underachieving. As Brian Ferneyhough pointed out in his description of an ensemble work of mine as “a sequence of non-objects”, the individual lines had little profile in themselves, it was only in conjunction with each other that the musical character appeared – the sum was very much greater than the parts. The music was, quite literally, emergent. This was all to change when I wrote my piccolo solo dé/ployé in 1987 – in a villa outside Siena, which may have liberated my imagination – and in the course of developing that piece evolved a methodology, perhaps even a style, that I have built on ever since. But I get ahead of myself.

In 1980 flutist Nancy Ruffer asked me for a new solo flute piece, a genre I had not previously tackled. I had just finished reading Robert Holdstock’s excellent, if rather neglected, novel Earthwind; the plot of this book hinges on the discovery that human colonists are gradually losing their long-term memories because their planet is oscillating in time; the title comes directly from a phrase in Earthwind that describes how the amnesia that is caused by this ‘phasing’ feels. This struck me as a richly promising notion for a piece, and it occurred to me that my rather rudimentary basset clarinet piece time (1979) might provide a suitable palimpsest for such a forgetting, so I attempted to forge a highly embellished retrograde version of time‘s musical thread …one that gradually abandoned detail. The result was caught breath of time. In fact, incremental amnesia turned out to be such a powerful musical behaviour that I have utilised it several times since for other works. At the time I was working in an office in Central London and there were difficulties with composing at home, so I wrote the entire piece after hours at my desk, with very limited scope for sketches or modelling. Whether this affected the music in any way is hard to judge, but the score does have an elegance and fluidity that might have been the result of my opportunity for improvisational focus.

Less conjecturally, because the time work consists of a – rather clichéd – single upwardly thrusting loop of permutated material, caught breath of time, being its retrograde, is a long, gliding downward arc, decorated with gradually dissipating flourishes and flutterings. The music can therefore be succinctly described as the poetically extemporised unwinding elaboration of a structurally-ordered descending girder. time was written for basset clarinet, an instrument that extends the normal clarinet’s already-huge range out to a full four octaves plus. So as not to lose this huge ambitus, I elected to have the flute player change instruments quite early in the music’s trajectory, at a moment of structural pause. Moving from concert flute to altoflute gives, as well as an extended tessitura, a subtle change of colour, from the laser-brightness of the concert flute to the pastoral breathiness of the alto; the consequent slight loss of focus underlines the amnesic erosion of the musical detail. Transitioning musically from sophistication to the elemental reflects the journey of the main character in Holdstock’s book: as his amnesia overwhelms him, he reverts to a pre-technological state, in itself a kind of pastoralism. Because of its derivation from the intensely concentrated if primitive time material, caught breath of time inherits a structural toughness that puts its extended rhapsody into high contrast. It ends in the only way it possibly could – the music bottoms-out – and evaporates.

caught breath of time has been performed by a number of great flautists, including Laura Chislett, Kathleen Gallagher, and of course Nancy Ruffer, who gave the World Première at the Purcell Room in London on 29 February 1981; it has appeared on CD twice, the first time on Laura’s Chris Dench: Music For Flute release; and, more recently, on Nancy’s Multiplicities.

In 2004 Australian flute player Jean Penny developed a spatialised version of caught breath of time, treating the flute with amplification as “a radiant metaphor for the passing of time”. Her complete article can be read in Resonate Magazine, 24 May 2010: Reactivating performative spaces: the meta-flautist’s zones of intensity.

† By ‘meaningful’ here, I mean beyond the simple self-referentiality of musical logic. There would seem to be a conceptual gulf between ‘a piece about the caught breath of time’ and the patterns of tempo and interval that constitute it.