Angelus (duration ca. 4'30") was composed in 2020 for Duncan Honeybourne, who commissioned it as part of his ‘Contemporary Piano Soundbites’ series.  Duncan gave the first performance online (during the pandemic lockdown of 2020) and subsequently recorded it for the Prima Facie label.

The title was suggested by a line from Bret Harte’s poem ‘The Angelus’: Bells of the past, whose long-forgotten music still fills the wide expanse…  

For me, one of the effects of the first national lockdown was a heightened awareness of the passing of time; sometimes each day could seem like an eternity, and those days of freedom before the lockdown – including the concerts I attended - became a very distant memory, although in reality they were still relatively recent.  In ‘Angelus’ I have attempted to create a sense of time passing slowly, within a miniature form.

 

Metronome (duration 6'10") was originally composed in 2010 but significantly revised in 2015; the new version was first performed by Mark Hutchinson in a concert at York St John University.

The title was borrowed from the graphic novel by Véronique Tanaka; it comprises an experimental non-linear narrative created from a series of repeating images which are used to convey a very human story in a highly formalised, ritualistic manner.

The music is based on process-like interlocking rhythmic patterns which emerge from a single pulsing note, with sudden, sometimes violent, interruptions.

(I was delighted to discover, subsequently, that Véronique Tanaka is in fact the artist Bryan Talbot, who like me, originates from Wigan).

 

From New York to Bedlam (duration ca. 3'10") (a ‘dark pastorale’) was composed in 2019 for Josephine Peach, who gave the first performance that same year in Ripon Cathedral. 

The music explores some of the potential rhythmic ambiguities in a bar of twelve quavers, obtained by dividing the bar in multiple different ways. 

The title is intentionally misleading: New York and Bedlam are villages on the B6165 between Ripley and Pateley Bridge, Nidderdale, North Yorkshire.

 

The Three Pieces for Piano can be performed individually or as a complete set.                                                                                                                                                                   DL