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"Three Trios". Recording by Marcus Barcham-Stevens (violin), Oliver Coates (cello), Mark Knoop (piano).

The research imperative was to test still further the ‘limits of fertile ground’ explored by the composer’s on-going absorption with the radical paring-down of musical materials. "Three Trios" pushes these limits even further than either "The Freedom of the Earth" or "Mala punica". The research process limited each phrase to no more than a single pitch or chord repeated at regular intervals, or a single long note. There are four different pitches used in the first trio, four in the second (ignoring microtonal inflections) and only three in the third; these pitches delineate the most elementary possible harmonic material. The principal structuring device used in the works is also elemental in that the material is arrayed canonically, each instrument having, with few adjustments, the same set of phrases in the same order but beginning at different points in the sequence.

A conceptual starting point for "Three Trios" was the Cageian tenet of an art enmeshed with life, and it is this that starts to explain the temporal specificity of the three sub-titles: July ’10, February ’11 and November ’11, the months within which the pieces were composed. The research process of composition therefore links the music explicitly to the composer in time, a feature underlined by the use of simultaneously recorded sounds enriching the composition room, sounds both personal (the researcher / composer’s daughter) and distant (traffic passing by). Through these processes exterior and interior sounds mesh, as art intersects life.

The work is therefore, in a sense, a game that plays with Time: the canons inside the music can, through temporal displacement, arrest the flow of time, whilst the exterior time-based sounds and titles create an additional line of counterpoint that can sometimes exist alongside compositional thought and at other times penetrate its fabric.