The Impermanence of Things (2009)

Movements

1. True singing is a different breath, about nothing
2. So we live here, forever taking leave
3. All things want to fly
4. Though the pool’s reflection often blurs before us
5. Every angel is terrifying
6. All that’s hurrying will quickly be past
7. Be forever dead in Eurydice
8. Another elegiac
9. From which flit ecstatic butterflies
10. Through a glass mountain
11. And those who are beautiful, oh who can retain the
12. Learn to forget that passionate music
13. May his memory be a blessing

The title of my piece is a Buddhist concept: if we fully accept that nothing lasts, then we may take a step - by letting go - towards finding tranquillity. Yet I also feel a deep attachment to things: remembered, passing, desired.

My piece tries to play out these coexisting ideas and feelings. Some of the 13 short movements are constantly on the move, nos. 3 and 9, for instance, also no. 6, a kind of troubled tango. Others, instead, change more in slow motion or circle repetitively. Still others are veiled in tone. Scattered in these last are fragmentary quotations of past music - objects, as it were, both grasped and disappearing. So, the piece begins with a snatch of half-heard Couperin. In the Venetian waters of movement 4, you may just pick out Mahler, Debussy and Nono. In no. 12, Couperin resurfaces alongside Morricone.

Throughout the piece, the piano is never a soloist in a conventional sense. Instead, it is by turns a binding thread, trigger, resonator, one of many singing lines. Structurally, too, the work’s patchwork nature avoids concerto convention. Nevertheless, it has a definite, still centre in no. 7; while the final movement, attempts some kind of transformation of these differing forces. Its surface is a series of slow, lamenting descents; below it, the wish to transcend earthbound things. The title of the last movement is a Jewish saying for one just died. Of the other titles, no. 10 is from W.G. Sebald, no. 8 is mine, while the others are from poems by Rilke.

This work was commissioned by the London Sinfonietta, who gave its first performance with Huw Watkins as soloist, conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth. The processed piano sounds in the piece were created in conjunction with Ian Dearden of Sound Intermedia.

Programme note by Michael Zev Gordon