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- Piers Hellawell
Airs, Waters and Floating Islands
- Peters Edition Limited (World)
This piano piece was commissioned by Susan Tomes, with funding from the Holst Foundation, and was premiered by her at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge on 15th February 1996. The piece plays continuously for 10’, alternating spiky, percussive music with a gentler, chorale-like texture; in a coda, these two elements find a way to combine. The piece is recorded by Mary Dullea on the 2012 Delphian disc ‘Airs, Waters’ (DCD34114).
Programme Note
This piano piece was commissioned by Susan Tomes, and was premiered by her at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge on 15th February 1996.
Airs, Waters and Floating Islands reflects, in its title, a concern with the juxtaposition of blocks of opposing musical expressions that is widely characteristic of my works. It was begun very much as a patchwork of these blocks, or ‘floating islands’, though later it took a more unified narrative form, with the coda for example reprising versions of the two main sections. The opening , chunky, cluster material – the ‘Airs’ – gives way to a stately flow of ‘Waters’; after a return of the clomping, cluster section the second idea is also reprised, as a chorale. The later part of the work moves into a more fluid world of passagework, relying heavily on a unison texture. Finally the coda brings back, refracted, the cluster and chorale ideas, growing ever closer together.
The contrast between blocks that interlock and separately evolve was characteristic of my pieces in the ‘90s, but it also pointed forward to multi-movement structures with segmented contrasts, such as my second quartet (2001) Driftwood on Sand – or to the connecting ‘bridge’ episodes of Agricolas (written in 2007). I have often likened such smaller component pieces, in the above works and in others including my ‘Sound Carvings’ series, to scattered ‘offshore islands’.
© Piers Hellawell 2012/2024