This summer I completed ‘a drawing-down of blinds’ in collaboration with pianist Alex Wilson. Alex commissioned the piece for his toured concert, ‘The Banks of Green Willow’, in aid of the British Red Cross. The concert features music by composers directly affected by World War 1 such as Bridge, Gurney and Ravel, plus music by less familiar composers whose lives were cut short by the war. Our work would provide a present-day perspective on the Great War.
Following the premiere in Bristol and the second concert in Exeter last month, the final concert of the tour is in Gloucester Cathedral Chapter House at 7.30pm on Wednesday 12th November. Tickets can be bought on the door or in advance online.
The piece developed after several months of conversation between me and Alex earlier this year, on how we deal with the memories of something as disastrous and catastrophic as World War 1. I decided to use the solo piano to explore ‘the weight of the past’. This idea translated into a physical relationship between pianist and piano – a struggle between the pianist’s weight and the piano’s materiality.
In the score, four continuous sections are marked by four quotations of Wilfred Owen, Henri Philippe Pétain, and Geoff Dyer. It was Dyer’s book The Missing of the Somme, which offers a meditation on the memorialisation of war, that put me onto these ideas. I found the book particularly illuminating and would recommend it to anyone wanting to explore present-day conceptions of the war, remembrance (or Remembrance), and our relationship to the past.