This piece is a response to the untimely death of Keith Elcombe, a prominent musician in and around Manchester in England.
I forget who it was said, "desire motivates us, and death stops us", but in saying it they encapsulated something about the form of our life, and therefore about the legitimate form of our music. In effect we, and our works, belong to an organic process, into which we can intervene with artistic notions of construction – commenting thereby upon Nature, and even artistically improving upon it; the idea being that the composition of music allows us to prepare what we have to say, to say it, and then to withdraw, in a manner more controlled and focussed than our immediate observations of Nature allow us to experience.
The present work adheres to the archetypes found in Nature, but operates from a conscious awareness of ambiguity – for example between the organic fact and the constructional impulse already mentioned – that Nature itself knows not of, but which I find it pertinent to propose the Creator (of Nature) certainly does. With this is mind, the work is therefore best described as a spiritual response to life. Life has to end, but Man has to create in the meantime, despite knowing that he will ultimately come to nought. In this general illustration of the ambiguity he has to live with, the human creator can 'kneel before imagination' for as long as it takes the sorrow and poignancy of death (in the case of this work) to be so thoroughly immured in form as to warrant the healing powers of Nature's archetypes to do their work.
Musically speaking, the emotion of bereavement seeks to notate an appropriate lyricism, which can be extended and transformed according to the classical rituals of shaping observed in tradition. These include dramatic opposition and resolution, the play of one music with another, and dance-like fixations on motive and pulse giving way to considerations of melody. The total, and the common aim – as someone else said – being the creation of Pattern out of Passion, and, as such, my objective tribute to the deceased.
