Output details

Thirty nine pages

Thirty-nine pages is one of a series of works that explores pre-existing musical scores, filtering and re-organising them. This work builds on practices developed during the composition of The Lure of Salvage (2003) and Take this personally (2004). These works explore the score materials on the index pages of piano anthologies by Schubert and Chopin respectively. Thirty-nine pages explores the Henle Urtext Edition of Cesar Franck's Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major. The piece was commissioned by Darragh Morgan and Mary Dullea and was performed in its complete form for the first time at Schott & Co., London (2009).

Each of the pages of the Henle Urtext edition of the score is subjected to a procedure that aims to re-organise the materials indigenous to the page. Examples include:

• Performing each of the pitches on a given page – individually – starting with the highest pitch and finishing with the lowest. The performance instructions associated with this indicate that each pitch or event should retain the duration and dynamic assigned to it in the score.

• Performing the final quaver of each bar.

• Performing each of the A naturals on the page.

Although the events retain their original duration their temporal relationship is lost as they become individual events with the instruction that once an event has been performed a gap should be left such that any subsequent event does not sound connected to the original event.

Throughout the piece fragments of the Franck can be heard emerging - a single note, a chord, a phrase - from the often stark and simple textures of the surrounding material. The work explores methodologies for re-reading, re-organising, re-categorising and re-sounding the materials in the Franck score and is one of a series of mis-readings of existing scores.