Three Sky Studies

  1. Chant-cris
  2. Not­turno/Ab­schied­slied I
  3. Aubade/Ab­schied­slied II

Three Sky Stud­ies, for solo piano, were com­posed over the course of 2009, with ‘Chant-cris’, a vir­tu­osic scat­ter­ing of notes in­spired by bird­song and El­liott Carter’s Caténaires, act­ing as a kind of short pre­lude to the sec­ond and third move­ments, which were writ­ten with pi­anist friends in mind. The first and last move­ments were work­shopped by Richard Casey in De­cem­ber 2009.

‘Not­turno/Ab­schied­slied I’ was writ­ten for Theo Vid­gen. It is made up al­most en­tirely of quiet, pul­sat­ing dyads and oc­ca­sional flur­ries at the top of the piano’s range — an ab­stracted mem­ory of ci­cadas shak­ing in the still sum­mer air, light van­ish­ing around the earth’s curve, Schoen­berg op. 19, no. 2, Scia­r­rino’s Not­turni, leaf-cast shadow and, be­tween the win­dows of the sea, dusk-lit fig­ures gath­er­ing left-over light. This move­ment was pre­miered on 26 No­vem­ber 2009 by Olivia Jageurs as part of the New Music North West Fes­ti­val (23-27 No­vem­ber) in a con­cert cel­e­brat­ing Peter Maxwell Davies’s new role as pa­tron of Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity Music So­ci­ety.

The final move­ment, ‘Aubade/Ab­schied­slied II’, was writ­ten for Yu Su and, after sev­eral early morn­ings sit­ting by the duck pond in my local park, was in­flu­enced by the warmth and un­fold­ing colour of dawn.