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what remains (1990-91) |
flute, bass clarinet and piano - 10'
what remains was commissioned with funds from the Arts Council of Great Britain by Harry Sparnaay for Het Trio, and completed in 1991, after which various planned performances failed to take place, for various more or less plausible reasons, so I should like to give special thanks to the performers of the premiere in July 1995 (Nancy Ruffer, Andrew Sparling, Ian Pace, with Roger Redgate conducting) for finally bringing it into the world.
The work forms a kind of postscript or epitaph to a group of eleven works under the collective title Fictions (indeed reworking materials and formal profiles from several of them), with the unfortunate complication that two of those compositions were still incomplete at the time of writing what remains. Nevertheless, what remains might be seen to have an atmosphere of piecing itself together, at first with some hesitancy (is the title a question or a description?), from a residuum of disparate "materials" (which include the disparate instrumentation), expanding into an intense polyphony where each instrument contributes several discrete layers, before disintegrating into an atomised state which is in turn abruptly and seemingly arbitrarily curtailed.
Another view: what remains as "chamber music", a succession of intimate formal chambers with dark secret corners, unexplained turnings, moments of startled illumination, a descendant of the disjointed, "experimental" forms of 17th century instrumental music.
© Richard Barrett