Sextet

Clarinet, Percussion and String Quartet Audio available by request

Programme Note

Sextet was originally composed as the finale to a recital of my music to mark the end of my undergraduate studies. Revisiting the piece just over 6 years later, I realise that certain musical preoccupations that are in my more recent music can be traced back to this piece. Obsessions with 2+1 rhythms, strictly quantised objects floating in free space, roadblocks preventing a longer melody from ever taking off – forcing restarts and new routes, can all be seen in this piece.

When I first wrote the piece, I remember intentionally starting from a place where all the drama in the music must be from the musical material employed in the piece, without any direct narrative meaning or trajectory, but, upon revisiting the music, I can see that, with a few revisions, I actually created a piece that has a strong narrative flow that relied on the order of it’s materials to reveal the characters; an antagonist (clarinet), a narrator/commentator (percussion), and a group of ever changing characters always played by the same actors (the string quartet). The piece takes on a cartoon-like characteristic when looked at through this lens, feeling like one is constantly shifting between holding a book and being the characters inside the pages. Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz come to mind, as the characters inside the pages are almost the same as those on the outside but with a Technicolor sheen.

Liam Mattison (London, Nov 2018)