Some words that I had nearby while writing this piece (courtesy of Roger Deakin, C.D. Wright, Seamus Heaney and Friedrich Dürrenmatt):
Daydreaming has been my making and my undoing —
like having a light at your back you can’t see but can still feel.
‘Since when,’ he asked,
‘Are the first and last line of any poem
where the poem begins and ends?’
Nur noch die Geige Einsteins ist zu hören.
The title is taken from a statement made by John Cage shortly before his death, in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian:
We live in a time I think not of mainstream but of many streams or even, if you insist on a river of time, that we have come to delta, maybe even beyond delta to an ocean which is going back to the skies.
Written for Trio Atem, …going back to the skies had its first performance in a ‘beat the rush hour’ concert on February 26 2010 in the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall at the University of Manchester. The concert featured several new works by Manchester-based composers commissioned for the occasion.
A revised version of this work was premiered by Trio Atem at King’s Place on Monday, 4 April 2011.