flute (2017)

No. 1 from the Second Flute Tetralog

Between 1986 and 1993, with the help of Laura Chislett, I wrote the First Flute Tetralog, a cluster of ad-hoc pieces that slowly evolved into a proper architecture. Over the seven years of writing them (in order, vier darmstädter aphorismen, dé/ployé, sulle scale della Fenice, and closing lemma) I gained a fair knowledge of the flute, which has informed my writing for the instrument ever since. This group of pieces, plus my earlier caught breath of time (1982) and shîn (1991), were released on an Etcetera CD in 1993. As it happens, dé/ployé (for piccolo) is probably my favourite of all my pieces, but sadly, due to my encroaching hearing loss I’ll probably never be able to listen to it properly again.

I was content, for another twenty years, to rest on my flute-related laurels; it was not until 2015 or so that I got a renewed urge to write something for solo flute – my seventh, or tenth, such piece, depending on how you count them – but it was very clear that such a piece would have to be categorically different from the earlier ones. The trigger was a tiny poem I found in my old friend Peter Bakowski’s the heart at 3 a.m collection, in a sequence called Some beliefs of mine ¹, and the title of the piece is the entire poem. After considering how, ideally, to create a work from Peter’s image, I settled very quickly on the flute; I’ve always felt that there is something auroral about the timbre of the instrument, and a naturalness about its means of sound production that is just more …well, unmediated than reed or string instruments. Bluntly, it sings.

At least part of my motivation to extend my flute catalogue has been to parallel the output of that other composer of multiple flute pieces, Salvatore Sciarrino. Only Dawn is… and Arpisms can be said to bear any slight resemblance to Sciarrino’s work, and then only in that they sometimes treat musical strings as single cells that are permutated intact, rather than developed. What connects my works and his is more the concept of a series of flute pieces that offer a changing perspective on the instrument itself, facets of its character, a collective portrait in a sense.

Dawn is… is dedicated to my two flute mentors: Laura Chislett, who taught me how to write properly for flute in the first place, and Kathleen Gallagher, who by championing the First Flute Tetralog in the very early ‘00s revived interest in my work at a time when my profile as a composer had bottomed out. The piece took a long while to write, and, as anyone who glances at the score can see, it remains in a provisional form, pending performance. Laura Chislett is in the process of learning, and editing, the score, and once she has played it I will prepare a definitive performance score. I also have to find an improved way of notating the timbre transitions in the middle section, but that’s a job for the future.

Working on Dawn is… awoke in me a fresh interest in the flute’s potential, and I followed it with another work – originally for Kingma alto, but now just for concert flute – called geminy [internal link], and very recently a third, Arpisms [internal link], also for concert flute. Together with seven types of time machine, a fourth flute work currently in the pipeline, these will constitute the Second Flute Tetralog; like the First a loose composite of pieces connected mainly by chronology. Maybe a future inheritor of the mantle of Kathleen Gallagher will do all four as a concert – one can only hope.