Sinfonia 21 cond. Martyn Brabbins
Honesty 1993
The BBC Philharmonic cond. Peter Maxwell Davies
Both kinds of honesty, the virtue and the plant Lunaria Annua
played their part in the genesis of my piece. Though the plant undergoes what is obviously a continuous growing process, it seemed to me to be more like a discrete series of stages with apparently no transition between them. These stages are very different from one another: from the small, rather untidy rosette of leaves through the maturity of the flowering plant to the skeletal, shell-like seed pods. While the qualities of these different stages of growth are only tangentially reproduced in the three broad sections of my piece, the idea of a relationship between the continuous and the disjunct, governed by the listener’s perception, played a significant role in the writing process. Through very simple musical means, the wide use of repetition, predominantly slow tempi and very little traditionally ‘composerly’ manipulation of musical material, I hoped to create an ambiguous sense of the level at which the musical continuity was being played out, drawing the ear to the events that occur within the sounds themselves and to the broader gestures within which they are located, rather than simply the notes out of which the piece is made.
Honesty Radio 3 interview
