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Mother Tongue Tautologies. Composition for orchestra. Commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra (UBS Soundscape Pioneers). Premiere: London Symphony Orchestra, LSO St Lukes, London, 24th June 2010. Score Only. URL and hard copy evidence date of dissemination.

The practice of doubling in orchestral music is essentially tautological. That is, the common redundancies in language— ‘general consensus’, ‘reiterate again’, ‘first priority’, ‘close proximity’, ‘null and void’, ‘pre-recorded’, etc.—are essential to the magnification of, or the duplication of, melodic line that we expect from an orchestrally-layered sound. This topic of tautologies— the reiteration of the same message in different manners—is emphasised in compatible ways in a number of Lewis Carroll’s games and puzzles from the 1880s. One Carroll riddle in particular, The Mysterious Number, reveals iterations of the same digits—with separate starting places from the base number of 142,857 without sequential rationality. For the purposes of this orchestral work I demonstrated Carroll’s ‘cantus firmus’ as a melody of changing dimensions such that it is heard again and again—tautologically—in vertically, horizontally and spatially changing positions. Everything, every component of the sound, is an uncanny echo of something previously heard. It is ‘first introduced’ then ‘over exaggerated’. The research question for such an enterprise was to distinguish a methodology separate from base repetition (as tautologies are made from redundancies rather than from mere repetitions) and to employ those methods in clear and legible ways using purely orchestral line and colour. This became an interrogation of changing emphasis and mutating scope within a tightly-fixed aural palette.