Abstract
This talk will consider the solo piano piece, Morning Music, from composer and performer perspectives. Morning Music is a memorial to the late Richard Hand, a fine guitarist and friend of both the composer and the work’s dedicatee, Nicola Meecham. The work is constructed from a pitch gamut that maps a cipher derived from Richard’s name onto the open strings of the guitar that, in turn, integrates four types of material; the construction of this pitch resource and the derivation of ideas therefrom will be discussed. In addition to this presentation of the work’s pre-compositional material the talk will illuminate the problem solving and decision making process underpinning the compositional process itself with recourse to the composer’s journal entries; in this way it is hoped that the ‘day to day’ aspects of compositional creativity will be usefully brought to the surface. Drawing on an interview conducted with Nicola Meecham the focus will be broadened to include Nicola’s interpretation of the score and the extent to which it is affected by the less determinate notational strategy adopted. This is important because one of the concerns of my recent compositional practice has been to acknowledge the creative nature of interpretation and to conceptualise it as an extension of the act of composition. In pursuit of this my recent scores have utilised varying degrees of indeterminacy in an attempt to liberate and expand the interpretative choices available to the performer. Such a strategy has affected change not only in notation but in the musical ideas themselves and this will be demonstrated through several scores that post-date Morning Music. The talk will include a performance of Morning Music and, it is hoped, the world premiere of a new work that builds on compositional and conceptual aspects of its predecessor.