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Air (1993) |
Solo violin - 6'
Air was written for Mary Oliver in October 1993, and is dedicated to her. At one level, it represents an attempt to allow the instrument - and its relationship to the hands of the player - to determine the material of the work (a feature common to all of my growing body of solo works since about 1986, but taken to further extremes here), from its individual pitches (based on a system of extension and contraction of gradually-shifting left-hand positions) to its overall form (in which a constantly-implied strand rises from low on the G string to high on the E). At the same time, the action of the bow is likened to the process of respiration, a process which is under increasing (and eventually terminal) threat of breakdown through the course of the work. The most important aspect of this kind of working, however, is that no distinction is made between the technical and expressive identity of this music (a feature it shares with its darkly-glimpsed antecedents in early baroque violin music). An instrument, after all, is not a "note-machine" but a means to articulate an "erotic dialogue between body and intellect" - a phrase used by Mary to characterise her own improvisatory work, itself naturally a crucial influence in shaping the present composition.
© Richard Barrett October 1993