to an utterance (2020)
(for piano and orchestra)

utterance /ˈʌt(ə)r(ə)ns/ n.

something uttered, a spoken word, murmured, disclosed, breathed, a statement, or vocal sound;

an act of uttering; vocal expression; the manner and power of speaking;

logic, philosophy an element of spoken language

linguistics. a speech sequence consisting of one or more words and preceded and followed by

silence;

ME C1400; OF C13, oultrance, from oultrer, to carry to excess, to pass beyond; L.:ultrā beyond

to an utterance

archaic + literary: the bitter end, the utmost, or last, extremity - to the brink of, at the precipice

”The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.“ (Exactitude, from Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino)

The solo piano within this concerto was conceived as a disembodied voice.

It seeks to tell its own story in endless variations, wavering, almost painful and inevitably unsustainable on an uncertain quest.

It seeks its final silence through its own excess of speaking: an incessant, compulsive soliloquy.

A musical protagonist being, on the precipice of non-being, among shadowy presences caught in limbo.            

As an image unfolds during the monologue, as it traces and seeks, it blurs, defies meaning, to finally lapse at the precipice of materialising.

June 2020, RS