Twenty twenty-five
It has been a very productive and, from a compositional viewpoint, busy year since last I blogged. So busy in fact that I have continually put off blogging until a quieter moment… which has never come. So I apologise if this is rather a dense update, but a fair amount has ensued.
Towards the end of 2024, after completing my tenor saxophone solo for Daniel Sclafani, silence, I embarked on a particularly expansive project: the piano trilogy vagantes. I had been thinking for years about creating a work that referenced Helen Waddell’s historic books, The Wandering Scholars and Mediaeval Latin Lyrics; I have also long wanted to write something honouring Ravel’s consummate piano work, itself a trilogy, Gaspard de la nuit. The intention was to create a partner piece to my older passing bells, of a comparable scale and extendedness: perhaps fifty minutes. I had high ambitions to complete the work in about three months, so that I could move on to other projects; this turned out to be lofty hubris. After those three months, December 2024, I had only completed the first section, I: water, drawn from a quiet sea. This music, a very distant relative of Ravel’s Ondine, gets its title from Waddell’s paraphrase of Cato the Elder’s description in de agri cultura of the production of Coan wine using seawater. I have been known to refer to the music of this piece as Denchbussy…
At which point I journeyed up to my favourite city, Brisbane, to rehearse with Alex Raineri and Drew Gilchrist, who were preparing to play three works on mine in the Brisbane Music Festival, Alex’s hometown shop window. At the same time those two indomitable players made CD and video recordings of the works: passing bells (2004-20) for piano, the effort to return to the cities of the sane (2022) for bass clarinet, and in Platonia (2024) for both. These were historic performances: both in Platonia and the complete passing bells were world premieres, and the effort to return to the cities of the sane an Australian first, together encompassing nearly ninety minutes of newness.
This combination of pieces was not arbitrary. passing bells is the final product of fully twenty years of gestation, and incorporates the older passing bells: night and passing bells: day into its 50 minute arc. passing bells: day won the 2020 APRA/AMCOS Award for Work of the Year: Chamber, largely as a result of Alex’s stunning performance the previous year. Independently, I wrote the effort to return to the cities of the sane for Drew in 2022, and when Alex proposed that he and Drew do those two works in a single concert it struck me that the pieces are so dissimilar that it would be desirable to round off the concert with a third work, one that combined the players. Thus was born in Platonia, which I tailored to their distinctive styles of playing. The live performances in Brisbane last December were therefore not just portraits of me as a composer, but also of the personalities of the players, highlighting their commitment to, and engagement with my music. I have really enjoyed working extendedly with these two players who, in addition to being outstanding executants, both possess deeply penetrating musicality and insight. I sincerely hope to continue our collaborations.
The edited recordings of the three pieces are nearly done (and very beautiful they are, too!), and we will then seek a CD label. I will blog again when there is more certainty around the releases.
The recording and editing to-and-fro of these works took me to the end of January, at which point I felt the need for a break from the fairly intense engagement with the piano of the previous few months. I turned, once again, to one of my favourite instruments, the flute, and began a work that I had been planning for literally decades, since I first read Three Painter-Poets, edited and translated by Harriett Watts, in 1974. The three painter-poets are Hans (Jean) Arp, Kurt Schwitters, and Paul Klee. The texts of Schwitters and Klee, while fascinating, did not seem to me to lend themselves to musical treatment – not in the way their visual art does – but the Arp texts have a rich imaginative flavour and are replete with neologisms. I chose three of these ‘colour-words’ as the basis for the work, rainpagodas, flowersphinx, and withered bells, and forged a single piece that intercut the music I wrote to signify these three. The whole work lacked a title for a long time, until I suddenly realised that the piece is at core an amalgam of Arpisms, and the piece got its name. From the start the piece was intended for the Texan flute player Elizabeth McNutt, and our own Australian Laura Chislett.
I completed Arpisms at the end of March 2025, and immediately re-immersed myself in the second section of vagantes, II: wandering on long roads, companionless. Dido is the protagonist of this music, referencing the end of Book IV of the Aeneid when she has been repudiated by Aeneas, and I wanted to catch the directionlessness of her bleak meanderings in a formal manner. To do that, I adopted a schema that I had never previously attempted – or at least, not in my mature works – that of permutable order. The first and last sections of the movement are fixed, but the intervening twenty-four ‘paragraphs’ can be played in any order. To give the music coherence, all the ‘paragraphs’ are linked in a six-fold way, and performers will likely, consciously or not, select routes through them that loosely adhere to this framework. To perform the entire musical configuration space that the structure posits would take around 14 million trillion years. Now that’s what I call ‘cyclomania’!
vagantes II took a lot of careful and protracted effort, and when I moved to the final section, III: a familiar ghost, at home among the olive trees, I vowed that I would complete it in a reasonable time-frame, not least because by that stage I was deep in discussion with Thomas Giles about the new work we were planning, a lengthy outing for solo saxophone + twelve saxophones – a saxophone orchestra, in effect. This latter will keep me busy for at least a year, so getting vagantes III done to maximise my future available time became a priority. If only life worked that way. Immediately I set out on III I realised that I was creating one of the most intensely crafted pieces I had ever set out on. The work consists of ten segments, each of which is structured similarly but with the durations gradually slowing, which I refer to as the ‘skeleton score’, over which a tegument of material is laid using the same mechanics that generated the skeleton but in a much more localised fashion. This tegument, after beginning ‘ripely’ (this is an olive grove after all), progressively thins as it moves towards the centre of the piece, at which point another material – the ‘ghost’ or the bishop, take your pick – intervenes in the musical progress. Immediately the ‘ghost’ has appeared the tegument material reverses its diminution and begins to regroup, albeit repeatedly interrupted by the ‘ghost’. Ultimately the ‘ghost’ material evaporates and the tegument gains energy, culminating in a final section that recalls the opening. I have elaborated on this particularly, because it is a piece in which the meaning is exemplified in its form, an outcome I always aspire to but frequently cannot achieve.
The entire vagantes trilogy was written for the remarkable American pianist James Iman, who is preparing the work as I write. When recordings begin to trickle through I will post them. Watch that space!
Which brings me up to the last few weeks, during which I have begun to plan and sketch the afore-mentioned saxophone orchestra piece, to be called 10^62. This may seem an odd title, but it refers to a very specific ratio: that between the smallest possible (theoretical) distance, the Planck length, and the (assumed) diameter of the visible universe, 92-3 billion light years. My new piece follows the structure of the Eames’ famous film Powers of Ten …except that I have adopted a fixed-frame-type structure, where the music, rather than moving smoothly up the magnitude gradient as the film does (too hard!), dwells on a particular scale for a period before moving to the next[1]. It is early days for this piece; I will post more about it as it progresses. The plan is that it will provide Thomas Giles with a solo part, and the ensemble, which consists of three saxophone quartets, one featured and two as ripieno, will exist both in a version for live performance and a studio-recorded playback option. Quixotically, Thomas plans to make this audio file himself; I am astonished at his ambition (and a bit daunted by my own).
Perhaps the most astonishing event of the whole year to date was when, a few days ago, the recorded performance of polyme(t)ric threads (2017) by duo entre-nous (Don-Paul Kahl and Jackie Glazier) arrived unexpectedly in my inbox, at 3:15 AM – I saw it arrive. It was a complete surprise – they had given me no warning of its imminence. I wrote the piece for them almost eight years ago, and, after they gave the first performance, moved my attention to other things. I had not realised that they had continued to hone their performance. Apparently they have given live performances of the work in the last weeks in Chicago, and found time to make this studio-quality recording for Don-Paul’s forthcoming CD, Quicksilver (available from the PARMA label early in 2026). The recording presents one of the finest and most articulate readings any of my works has ever had, clearly the product of many years of preparation and dedicated rehearsal on their parts, and listening to this unexpected and glorious gift reminded me why it is I do what I do. I cannot thank them enough.
There will be a film of Don-Paul and Jackie’s live performance of polyme(t)ric threads soon, and it will be available to view in the dedicated tab on my webpage. Another space to watch.
Speaking of CDs, the studio recordings of the three Brisbane pieces, passing bells, in Platonia, and the effort to return to the cities of the sane, are nearly finished, and we will then seek a CD label to release them. Similarly, Luca Quintavalle is recording my harpsichord piece ‘…flickering instantiation…’ in the near future, with a view to releasing that on his next CD. More news on both these projects as it emerges.
It’s been a busy year. I will try not to let another twelve months pass before my next blog, but no promises…
[1] Amusingly, the Powers of Ten film begins at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, the city where my saxophone music has been lately featured.