THIS WORLD TURNING for wind quintet (2005)

This work was commissioned by Kathryn Thomas and the Galliard Ensemble and the Peter Gould Music Trust, and funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation. The premiere was at Theatr Mwldan in Cardigan, Wales, UK in March 2005. The Galliards subsequently took it to the London Chamber Music Festival at the Conway Hall.

The composer writes: 'This work is for the most part a reflective piece, heavily reliant upon a single falling four or five-note phrase. The motif itself comes from a short vocal piece also by me entitled Learning in which I set my own poem about the 'state of things', that is to say the impending man-made ecological meltdown, wars, political deceit. The composition of this piece also came at the time of the horrifying tsunami in asia and to an extent the opening music reflects my idea of how it must have been on those terrible beaches in the hours following the wave: silence, death, weeping, and the sea, back to its innocent self. But I suppose the starting point for the piece was Learning - ever since the Iraq war of 2003 I have never quite been able to focus on much else and so the same feelings which inspired the sextet Children of Baghdad and the short choral piece Pacem also inspired Learning and now this wind quintet.

The mantra-like quality of much of the piece literally suggests a world, which, for all its woes, still turns and life somehow goes on. Much of the writing is free, where players are asked to repeat a short passage independently for a certain length of time, petering out at a given signal. As time goes on there is faster music with more passion and anguish. At what I see as the climax, each member of the quintet in turn is releassed from the anguished music to join an extended melody first heard on the horn, until finally all are playing in unison. But a last-minute whim changed my original ending to the present one, brutal and cold.
DURATION about 12'
In M.S