family photos

24’

piano solo
for XinRu Chen

When writing this piece I was working with the knowledge that this music would be paired with Schumann’s Carnival.

What I didn’t know until later was that mine and Schumann’s music would be woven together into a single 50 minute stretch - a significant feat of pianistic athleticism for XinRu but more significantly, an incredibly flattering and satisfying transfer of ownership of the material. In cutting, reordering and weaving the pieces together, XinRu expanded her role in the performance to include a compositional one.

This extract is the third movement of my piece, and depicts a road that my partner and I wandered down in which the sound and view of Hastings harbour comes and goes in remarkably quick succession.