Output details

Inflorescence, for saxophone and piano

This 18-minute through-composed piece was commissioned by, and written in close collaboration with, Kyle Horch, Professor of Saxophone at the RCM and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) saxophonist, who had requested a serious, large-scale work to add to the solo saxophone repertoire. It was first performed by Horch with pianist Pavel Timofejevsky on 20.6.11, subsequently performed on 28.6.12, and featured in the World Sax Congress WSCXVI at St Andrew’s University 12.7.12 (YouTube http://youtu.be/CnGhjYCHTyk).

The piece forms part of a series of works based around David Hart’s _Crag Inspector_ – a book-length poem about a poet struggling to find his voice, set on the wild landscape of Bardsey Island. Each piece forms a sketch towards a forthcoming opera based on the poem. Johnson’s vision for this piece was to find a musical allegory for the strangely absorbed character of the Crag Inspector who is searching for his poetic voice through his natural surroundings. As one manifestation of this man’s ‘blossom’ is his poetry, so the piece aims to construct another, through music.

‘Inflorescence’ means ‘mode of branching of a flower-bearing axis’ (from the Latin _inflorescere_ ‘to begin to blossom’)’ (Chambers). The piece opens with sharply defined sections, each identified with a flower mentioned in the poem, out of which blossoms the saxophone aria in Part 2 (bars 370-435). In Part 1 the saxophone is always working in tandem with the piano, but in Part 2 the music is in fact setting words from the poem ‘sung’ by the saxophone, while the piano moves freely around the flower material.

Writing _Inflorescence_ involved close collaboration with both players to find the most effective ways of selecting, notating and performing saxophone microtonal trills (e.g. bar 79) and glissandi (e.g. bar 235) and tremolo effects in the piano part (e.g. bar 180).