Output details

a thousand golden bells in the breeze (for harp and two doublebasses)

A Thousand Golden Bells in the Breeze for harp and a pair of double basses is related in the manner of a Picasso ‘series’ to my homonymous piece for double-manual baroque harpsichord (first performance: Chau-Yee Lo, St. Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh Festival 2009). My writing for a Taskin harpsichord in the earlier piece was inspired by Shivkumar Sharma’s improvisations on the Indian santoor, and in particular his delicate combinations of contrasting timbres, which result from lightly striking, bouncing, and gliding the mallets at various distances from the bridges. A main concern in the ensuing trio version was to create a distinctive sound world that echoed and transformed the characteristic nuances and figurations of both the santoor and the baroque harpsichord by relying on the palette of 'extended harp techniques' developed by Salzedo, while the pair of double basses provide a sustaining pedal for the harp harmonies as well as a source of melodic writing in the tenor register. In this sense this piece is a study in transformation involving the invention of 'mimetic sonorities' that acquire a life of their own and in turn articulate musical material that is subjected to a chain of transformations both within a work and across to a new piece in the cycle.

Both the imagery and the form draw their inspiration from an episode in Sudhana’s journey of spiritual realization, as related in the Avatamsaka Sutra. The disciple has an encounter with a female teacher and finds in her sublime sensuality a ‘gate’ to the essence of sound. My piece contains two such ‘gates’ to a sound world (each characterised by a particular 'compositional modality'). On entering each 'gate' we hear a phrase evoking the chiming of an ethereal carillon, which returns at the very end of the work.