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Preludes and Afterthoughts- Fantasy Transcriptions on Chopin's Preludes Op. 28. Composition for Piano. Premiere: 11th July 2013, Casalmaggiore Festival, followed by a Canadian Tour (2013). CD recording plus score. URL and hard copy evidence date of dissemination.

The piece is a set of seven linked movements based on five of Chopin’s Preludes Op. 28. As the title suggests, the research context for the piece is in the 'music about music' genre, and along the lines of Kagel’s Metapiece (1961), where the pianist inserts sections of another (older) work at designated points in his score. The use of quotations in 2 and 5 are not meant primarily to set up a polarity between past relics and ‘modernity’, as in George Crumb’s Dark Angels. I was more interested in exploring a research process that developed ambiguities and tensions inherent in the Preludes themselves, developing a musical narrative that contextualises and develops these aspects, and drawing on ideas in semiotic analysis. The cycle’s idée fixe is the climactic V/b-minor chord in Chopin’s A-Major Prelude, described in Rose Subotnik’s Deconstructive Variations (1999) as: “calling more attention to its force as an isolated moment than to its power of reference to other sources of meaning” (i.e. harmonic logic). This chord becomes a pivotal symbol throughout the cycle – its hierarchical ambiguity intensified in unusual contexts, such as in 3 when the whole Prelude is replayed in retrograde. Similarly, in 1 a secondary gesture in the E-minor Prelude is repositioned and reversed, creating an ‘Eastern’ modality and a new found primary focus – or “specificity of the here and now” (Subotnik), and the meaning of the A-Flat-Major in 5 is reduced to a single prolonged ‘moment’ by submerging it in sustaining pedal. The work’s originality as a work of research is therefore twofold. There is firstly a process of creative musical ‘deconstruction’ that is audible in the composed result. And secondly,this very mode of deconstruction has an extramusical influence, and one that is informed by theoretical writing. The piece should therefore we thought of as and entity that comprises not just sound and score, but also a series of precise extra- and metamusical associations.