Solo piano [13’]
Written for Andrew Zolinsky, and performed at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2022.
Programme Note
In Something other than the fear of falling, I sought to create material that was possessed of a tactile physicality. My recent work has been marked by an interest in ‘sculptural’ approaches to musical materials, and in this work, I pursue situations where musical objects can be examined from different angles through restatement, rotational movement, and gradual change.
Something other than the fear of falling operates as a triptych, and in the first panel, two closely related, temporally distinct planes of material are placed in opposition. The dialogue between them is unstable and dizzy - elastic and compulsive. As I was writing, I felt that these two planes might be buffeting some invisible object - perhaps attempting to keep it in flight.
In the central panel of the work, what was once kinetic, agile, and bright falls (or fails), and becomes tarnished, blunted, and etherised. Lines float, stretch, and coil in a dense fog of resonance, as if trying to gather enough energy to resurface.
In the final panel, the harmony tightens again, and the material regains its energy, spilling forward, but still, I feel, bearing the mark of its submersion - it is more frantic, less sure of its footing, but still determined.
Broadly speaking, I think that the piece is about vertigo, in all of its disturbing ambiguity.
Read a review of the performance here.