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18’
fl. cl. pno. perc. string quartet
commissioned by London Contemporary Music Festival, written for Apartment House
revised in 2020 (hitherto unperformed)
Slow motion romantics vol.II is a collection of pieces for three small ensembles that occur simultaneously.
Like a lot of my recent music, it’s loosely concerned with balancing big blocks of material alongside or on top of one another, rather than following through a linear narrative or trajectory, a concept loosely influenced by the work of the so-called ‘land artists’ and minimalist sculptors. Yet whereas these artists often use extremely paired down, blunt, unexpressive material - slabs of concrete, steel, wood in simple geometric shapes - the musical material in this piece is generally chaotic, highly ornamented to the point of cacophony, entangled beyond clarity. The hugely detailed individual parts of the piece smother one another as the three small ensembles are superimposed, rather than neatly arranged or ‘composed’ to create foregrounds and backgrounds / melodies and accompaniments.
Slow motion romantics vol.II presents these huge, seemingly static shapes which are made out of an amorphous, kinetic, romantic-mess and baroque-rubble, through which an audience member can rummage and find something of their own. Repetition - both real and imagined - is used to manage textures which are static but never identical from one moment to the next, often using simple, almost Oulipian processes which govern the music of the three ensembles and how they act autonomously and interact as a whole.