d'aujourd'hui

In composing Two Night Movements it was my intention to try to express feelings and emotions that night brings. During one magical, hot, windy summer evening at Christmas Hills, a sleepy hollow amongst rolling hills near Melbourne, in the middle of the bush and under stars clear and brilliant, themes of Full Moon surfaced. In the night I heard the faint stirrings of nocturnal creatures and trees rustling, while the opal glow of the full moon shone, reigning over all. As the piece evolved, I imagined magical specters and apparitions dancing and flying through clouds – friendly, yet a little unsettling and strange – and their dance was of yearning, love, hope and wonderment. On the other hand the second movement, Banshee, depicts a wild spirit of the night. A gypsy, its dance is boisterous and swift, almost demented. Its cheekily threatening nature gives way, towards the end, to a passionate, plaintive song before returning once again to its reckless flight and screeching end.

I decided to write a collection of pieces that would give them choices, i.e. they would not have to do each one. I tried to write as varied pieces as possible and each would last about a minute and a half long. Some movements are quite minimal and based on just a few notes and some are more like ragtime. Occasionally I used a motive from my previously composed pieces. The suite was written over a few weeks, and I was sending them to the players in bits. They were very patient with me. I am not a guitar player, I was grateful that Tim generously helped me with the guitar figurations and he re-configured the textures of some sections to make the writing more idiomatic. The 9 pieces can be played in any order, but the way they are numbered is the order in which they were written.

In 2005, when I was still an impoverished uni student, I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Darwin International Guitar Festival. Until then, I had never even considered writing for guitar, but after two weeks in the company of hundreds of these wonderful instruments and their owners, I was hooked. Since then I have moved on to become an impoverished composer, and have written a number of very different works for guitar.

Earwig was written in early 2006 not long after my return from the Festival, however it started out life as a piece for guitar and percussion. In my experience, a piece isn’t truly ‘finished’ until the performers get their hands on it, and as such, Earwig has gone through several different incarnations over the years. Here, for the first time, a violin replaces the percussion. It was a great challenge to find a way to keep the quirky flavour of the piece intact while still making use of the new timbres afforded by the violin. As such, the piece is now much more earthy than previous incarnations – woodblocks and triangles are replaced by tongue clicks and knuckle-taps, bright, brittle marimba passages with darker gypsy-inspired melodies, and overall the piece has a much more melancholy lyricism in the hands of Daniel and Zoë.