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 Lost

Solo piano

This composition was commissioned by the TRANSIT festival in Leuven for Ian Pace, to whom it is dedicated, and who gave the first performance there on 24 October 2004.

One way of describing this music might be as a labyrinth with transparent walls. Its structural interconnections are indeed quite convoluted and its sound-textures diaphanous, but this latter quality isn't necessarily as much help in 'finding one's way' as it might appear to be. At the centre of the labyrinth is a systematic generative procedure where the pitches of a quasi-serial sequence in the left hand form the 'fundamentals' for a constant permutation in the right hand of the first eight even-numbered 'natural' harmonics, to produce a stream of mostly wide and more or less consonant dyads. This centre however has become 'lost' within a proliferating network of interpolations, extrapolations, interruptions and so on, while at the same time defining the particular 'introverted' quality of the whole piece.

© Richard Barrett 2005