Programme Note
The challenge of writing a third work for this particular combination of instruments (vln/vc/pfte) was one that I considered carefully before accepting. Initially I had viewed with reserve the essentially nineteenth century nature of this grouping of instruments. I thought of its cafe and salon music antecedents and the tendency of some of the existing trios to aspire to be mini piano concertos (accompanied by violin and cello). My response to this compositionally was to choose musical ideas and figurations which suggest the popular music of today. An early tongue-in-cheek, working title was ‘Popular Music’. Though my work is dominated by piano it largely eschews virtuosity.
A second key idea was connected with ‘Songlines’. This has been explored in literary forms by Bruce Chatwin, and musically by Kevin Volans and Peter Sculthorpe. A cultural construct of aboriginal peoples, it correlates directly the ideas of travel, life/journeying and music. I was interested in exploring these ideas in a Welsh context and my interest was further aroused by a comment by someone close to where I live. “At one time it was moor land from here to North Wales.” Last year I had written a solo piano piece ‘Inner Landscapes’ and I was interested also in the idea of an imaginary journey.
A third stimulus came from a remark made by Annette Morreau during the 1994 Vale of Glamorgan Festival. Referring to the strong rhythmic basis and simple harmonic structure of some recent music, she went on to note that melody was still very unfashionable. Given the nature of the combination of instruments I was drawn to writing very prominent melodic lines for the violin and cello in particular.
With such a rich and mixed source of inspiration the choice of a title was difficult, until one day I found a mysterious hand-written quote on my desk – ‘Rest in Reason, Move in Passion’. Despite having no knowledge of where it came from, I liked it immediately. As it somehow suggested the world of the piece to me, I adopted it as a title. It was only years later in 2020 that I found out that it was a quotation from The Prophet (1923) by the Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931).
On a musical level the piece represented a new departure for me. It is entirely based on a sequence of four bass notes: E – C – A – D. Essentially the work is built modally on these notes with a couple of transpositions somewhat after halfway through the piece. There are twelve variations on this simple scheme of things, played without a break and lasting about fifteen minutes.
‘Rest in Reason, Move in Passion’ was commissioned by the Lower Machen Festival with funds made available by the Arts Council of Wales.