Programme Note
The starting point for this piece was a few bars of the piano accompaniment of a setting of the Welsh folk song Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn (Watching the White Wheat) which I wrote in November 2014. They are quoted at the very beginning of the work and in those bars and elsewhere in the piece it is possible to detect motifs from the folk song. These antecedents and its hymn-like quality suggested the title CHANT.
Though not demonstrably ‘pianistic’ in the traditional sense, CHANT in its brief span visits almost the entire keyboard. In particular, rather in the manner of a study, the simple melodic material is often answered, echoed, interrupted or simply continued in different registers, thus bringing into play contrasts and opposites while at the same time requiring the performer to maintain always a feeling of the legato line even when the music moves mid-flow to a different area of the keyboard. The sense of opposites is also enhanced by the presentation of similar material in major or minor modalities. A core structural principle is the pedal note B flat present throughout the piece.
CHANT was commissioned by colleagues at Kiltearn Medical Centre in Nantwich, England for the dedicatee Marie McKavanagh on the occasion of her retirement after 32 years working for the National Health Service in the United Kingdom