Seeking and Discovering

I had done the three year cycle of Tonsatz (music theory) studies. I wanted to complete some work that I had started but not completed before and also make a new beginning at the same time.

Devotion

Devotion for piano and flute came into being because I had always felt that cadences were also music and could be lovely, even though at school everybody stopped talking about the music when the composer started the cadence. Then it grew into more.

Grief

Grief started life as an effort to write a piece for a choir. With my replay software, there was no chance that I would ever hear it sung, so I reworked it as a quartet. I tried different instruments to see what would work best.

3 Dances

3 Dances came into being because I liked the idea to impose different dances. The melodic idea I had for the first dance turned into three dances for piano, flute and cello. At this stage, I was also interested in combining “orthodox” and octatonic harmonies.

I also reworked the 7 Left Behind pieces into trios for trumpet, english horn and cello.

My last project, not yet completed, is called My Happy Idea. You can read more about this in the Work in Progress section, where I describe how they came into being and what was going on in my mind at that time. I wanted to try to use the same melodic idea and write a song, a duo, a trio and a quartet (currently being worked on!). Like children from the same parents, each of these pieces is quite different from the others. As their “parent”, I love each of them, of course.