Steeped in memory and washed in brine, these pieces celebrate a passionate engagement with the natural world and a continuity of human effort in the trace of transition – in the face of love and loss. The Three Sea Changes were written at different periods of Lilburn's life: No. 1 in 1945 (initially the only one called Sea Change and recorded as such by Margaret Nielsen in 1945), No. 2 (a Prelude) in 1950, and No. 3 in 1972. By 1981 the composer had entered a period of looking back at earlier works and revising them. It was then that he gathered the three pieces together under the collective title Three Sea Changes.