Programme Note
Six Palindromes (Sextet for piano and wind) 2016/2017
The Wind Quintet could be considered the archetypal 21stcentury extended family. This ensemble of two double reed instruments, a single reed instrument, a metal flute and a brass instrument has ventured far from its ‘woodwind’ roots, Maybe it is that that has encouraged composers to favour the witty, the bucolic and the quirky when writing for it.
One of the fascinations about being a composer is the challenge of very strict intellectual structures, witness The Musical Offering of J S Bach. My starting point for the writing of this work was a piece I wrote in the 1990’s for Six Pianos entitled Never Odd or Even (The verbal palindrome accounts for the grammatically incorrect title).
For the earlier version I took Never Odd or Even (now the sixth and final movement) as a starting point and first wrote three further palindromes – a second piece using the same chord sequence and two other pieces with a different but comparable chord sequence). These four pieces were commissioned by the Fishguard Festival and given their world premiere there in July 2016 by London Winds with Peter Donohoe (piano) (See Sextet for Piano and Wind for further information).
Subsequently, I made some minor revisions to the existing four and added a further two, making this final set of Six Palindromes.
I haven’t been uniformly strict with the palindromes and it is perhaps more accurate to describe the six movements as ‘palindromic’ rather than palindromes per se. However, a musical feature common to all six movements is two sets of chords in five parts. Each set is palindromic in itself; so, for example, the first part of set one in the first movement is a sequence of 11 chords of which chord 6 is the central chord and chords 5 and 7, 4 and 8 are the same and so on. There are many other palindromic devices in the work concerned with melody, rhythm and dynamics as well as harmony.
This musicological preamble should not mask the fact that this is essentially a light-hearted series of musical puzzles. Movements 1 &4 are Allegretto, 2 & 5 Lento and 3 & 6 Allegro. 1, 3 and 5 use the same palindromic chord set as do 2, 4 and 6. 1 and 4 have a ‘jazz’ bass while 2 and 5 feature solos (itself a palindrome) for all five wind instruments. 3 and 6 are busy fast movements with complex polyrhythms with movement six being the starting point –Never Odd or Even.