3 November 2018, Konzerthaus, Wien (Wien Modern)
13 April 2019, Festival Mostra Sonora, Sueca, Spain
Programme Note by the composer:
The music was written, somehow, without noticing that the instrumentation is really a jazz combo’s. So, while some jazz sometimes, more or less unconsciously, slips into my writing, if it does so here, that is an accident, but one that I’m happy to accept. There is more explicit “found” material used in the music: from Bach’s cantatas “Brich den Hungrigen dein Brot” and “Bleib bei Uns denn es wird Abend werden”; political folk songs, “Hold the Line”, “Picket Line Song”; the Brecht-Eisler song “Lob des Lernens”; and part of a small piece written for a young Gabriel Hodges. None of these are intended to be easily, if at all, recognizable. They are “material”, initial moves, in pitch and rhythmic configurations, for the compositional process; and at the same time the feelings and ideas of these sources are somehow at work too. The compositional process is multiple, different ways of writing, polyphonic, monophonic, heterophonic, modal, chromatic; discontinuous: no over-arching plan, composing more like improvising, though micro-systems are constantly used and shifted about.