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A Haydn Prelude (for piano solo)

Commissioned by the Presteigne Festival for the 70th birthday of John McCabe CBE.

Premiere in Wales in August 2009, and published the same year by Music Haven London (ISMN 979-0-900-21710-3).

Recording issued by Guild Music on CD in April 2012 (GMCD 7381) by Anthony Hewitt (piano).

Also published in its entirety in a featured article in ‘International Piano’ (Rhinegold Publishing, Jan/Feb 2010, Number 67).

John McCabe's 70th birthday in 2009, for which this piece was commissioned, coincided with the 200th anniversary of the death of the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn. Since, as well as being a well-known composer, McCabe also made the first-ever complete recording of Haydn's piano sonatas in the 1980s, a piece that could somehow combine these strands seemed an interesting research question and opportunity. In the resulting Prelude I therefore dissolved quotations from two of Haydn's piano sonatas (Hob.XVI/31 & 32), an approach that was to slightly modify my style and alter the balance of constituent elements in order to make its implicit references to old musical gestures, meaning and discourse, suddenly more 'explicit', whilst at the same time not compromising my distinctive personal musical voice.

The result was thus something of an eerie poetic 'contextualisation' and commentary on the Haydn original sources, coming in and out of aural focus, a distinctive and original way in which two very different musical 'signatures' could be mutually present and somehow collaborate and speak with one another on a number of simultaneous levels. The way in which the research question was addressed has crafted an unusual piano piece, and one that has frequently been performed, disseminated and reviewed.

Building upon my sustained creative work in the concert music field, the work provides a useful 'distilled' example of the distinctive compositional voice and approach that I have developed over the last 20 years. Sitting crucially in the void between modernism and postmodernism, it a stylistic approach that is only now beginning to be documented by analytical and historical musicologists, using working terms such as 'second modernism' (Mahnkopf, 2009; Metzer, 2010) and 'neomodernism' (Dromey, 2013).