Slippage
Instrumentation:
Flute, oboe, clarinet, piano, & str(s) violin, viola, 'cello
& double bass
Duration: 8'
Date of Composition:
1999
Commissioning Details:
Commissioned for the State of the Nation Festival by the London
Sinfonietta
Premiere:
London Sinfonietta, Martyn Brabbins (cond.), 10 April 1999, Queen
Elizabeth Hall, London (State of the Nation weekend)
Availability:
Score and parts available for rental, ref. HL333
Programme Note
A
new composition may originate by many different routes. In my
case, a word and its related ideas often form the trigger to release a
range of meanings and associations that mysteriously feed into the
piece. “Slippage” was such a word in the case of this
seven-minute composition, bringing to mind the following themes:
- Walter Benjamin’s use of the word to denote the transfer of geological or ecological terminology to describe things in the urban world (the petrified, frozen or obsolete inventory of cultural fragments spoke to him like fossils or like plants in a collector’s herbarium).
- Almost as if by accident, chords seem to have slipped into the fabric of the piece which are somewhat askew - like selecting shells along a sea shore which take one’s fancy.
- The slippage of melodic lines, which ideally should be in unison, but jostle against one another at different speeds and phrase-lengths.
- Robert Smitheson, the land-art sculptor of the 1970s, compared the human mind to a terrain, a chaos of geological slippage.
The origins of the piece lie in a musical fragment which I composed last summer at the Dartington Summer School of Music, and which reappears here. This is another example of slippage – from one period of time to another.
© Morgan Hayes
Review
There is much more [than deft scoring] to a piece such as Slippage
by Morgan Hayes - a microtonal, complexly rhythmic octet in which an
eruptive piano solo slips out of the 'geological' layers in which it
had been embedded... His idiom with its skewed interplay of lines
evokes that of his teacher Michael Finnissy but only as a background
against which a new harmonic sweetness and approach to form define
themselves.
For further information about Morgan
Hayes and his works,
please e-mail Richard Bullen richard@stainer.co.uk
