A fountain [2024]

for piano

duration :: 16’

Written for Nicolas Hodges

First performance :: Nicolas Hodges — 3 November 2024 — Orgelpark, Amsterdam

A fountain is a series of hoverings around Johannes Ciconia's famous virelai "Sus' un fontayne." For the most part, though—aside from a few moments of clarity here and there that usually take the form of more or less isolated harmonies or scattered, lost fragments of scales or other bare melodic elements—those hoverings take place at a significant distance.

They also, despite their differences in length, rhetoric, energies, each take a similar form: an event occurs, and then stumblingly attempts to continue, to fend off evaporation.

This piece is dedicated in gratitude and admiration to Nicolas Hodges, with thanks for his interest in my work over the past decade, but the late Harrison Birtwistle is also hovering: a longtime friend and colleague of Hodges', another transcriber of "Sus' un fontayne," and the great master of the struggle forward.