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Soliloquy V : Flauto Acerbo for Alto & Tenor Recorders

10 minutes. Commissioned by Christopher Orton and the BBC Performing Arts Fund. Premiere at Greenwich Early Music International Festival, 16th November 2008. World British Composer Award winning work in the Solo/Duo Category, BASCA 2009. Selected by the International Jury for the 2012 ISCM World Music Days in Belgium, European Premiere: 1 November 2012, Concertgebouw, Bruges. Published by UYMP

Working closely with recorder virtuoso Christopher Orton, I was encouraged to push the instrumental boundaries as far as possible. Orton’s huge technical and expressive vocabulary, range of colours, and repertoire of effective extended techniques changed my perception of the instrument. As with _Soliloquy IV_, the main musical idea here is based on certain modal segments often associated with Eastern European musical cultures. These are prominent in the folk music of the Southern Balkans, but in this piece they are constantly surrounded by chromatic and micro-tonal inflections. Although the work begins and ends with breathy noise, where pitch is almost non-existent, certain tonal centres are established throughout the piece and play a role in the articulation of the overall formal structure. My approach here was to focus on the dynamics of counterpoint which gradually becomes the main feature of the musical discourse. Exploration of the three registers of the Alto recorder, which constitutes the main thrust of the composition, provides a basis upon which multi-layered textures operate, while the section for Tenor recorder forms a contrasting episode which echoes the sonorities of the shakuhachi. Virtuosity and expressivity combine in a variety of forms and, although certain melodic contours are displayed throughout (as a reminder of the instruments’ capability of lyrical expression), the idiosyncratic character of the piece is perhaps most clearly described by the second part of the title – 'Flauto Acerbo'.