mille-fleur [2025]

for alto flute, bass recorder, tenor trombone, percussion, clavichord and double bass

duration :: 6’

Commissioned by ELISION

First performance :: ELISION— 17 April 2026 — Klangbrücken Festival, Hannover, Germany

“mille-fleur” (“a thousand flowers”) is the term for the style of background decoration typical of, among other things, Burgundian tapestries from around the turn of the sixteenth century: a riotous profusion of little blossoms, ferns, vegetations, at least as detailed and eye-catching as the figures to which it forms the ostensible supporting ground.

There are no figures here, no foreground; there is also almost no background. Years ago I wrote a program note describing a piece of mine as “a perforated gloss of an absent center”. This piece is similar, in a sense, except that the gloss is also almost absent. There is just enough of it left to suggest a former profusion of ornamental detail, but all we have are the last faded tatters.

mille-fleur is dedicated to Aaron Cassidy on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, in warm celebration of over twenty years of friendship and artistic fellowship. There might be the barest hint of a celebratory fanfare buried in here.