Mikrokonzert: I Swear I Saw the Sun Falling

For a while now, I have been in­ter­ested in the edges of things: where things start and stop being, where they vanish, where one idea bleeds into an­other. This piece at­tempts to com­bine found sounds and streams of ‘noise’ that we carry with us in the back­ground of our lives — ra­dios, pop music, con­ver­sa­tions, re­membered places — only oc­ca­sion­ally gliding into focus as we pass by an open door, with a more ‘ab­stract’ mu­sical dis­course. Far from going on a nos­talgia trip, I want to ex­amine the way we re­member, the way we share our ex­per­i­ences and how every sound we will ever hear will be im­bued with con­nec­tions we ourselves may not be able to verb­alise. The cre­ative act seems to me to be a con­stant re-evaluation and pro­cessing of all our ab­sorbed ex­per­i­ences, re­con­fig­uring these into a mu­sical con­stel­la­tion — a com­muning with our per­son­al­ised ver­sions of what the Renaissance Neoplatonists might name the ‘world-soul’ or Schopenhauer the ‘will’, but without the meta­physics. We cannot, and should not want to, es­cape our myriad ties to his­tory and to each other, nor should we em­brace these blindly, but al­ways go on thinking, thinking and rethinking.

The cello part of Mikrokonzert was written for Alice Purton and it was premiered by her with the Vaganza New Music Ensemble on 16 May 2010 at the York Spring Festival of New Music.