About:

This is my second piece based on the music of Orlando Gibbons. (The first was Seven Inventions for cello octet, written for Cellophony).

The piece is based on a number of Gibbons’s instrumental Fantasias, dances, and the madrigal ‘Nay, let me weep’.

In this piece I explore the idea of creative transcription and ‘recomposition’, i.e. the borrowing and reworking of existing music from different eras to create a new work somehow in dialogue with the originals.

Each movement explores a simple musical idea based on features of the originals, moving from unadorned melodies and chorales, through imitative canonic writing, to more complex, layered textures which distort the originals in different ways.

Movements:

I - Lines
II - Chords
III - Canon 1
IV - Canon 2
V - Reflection

I have also transcribed Gibbons’s madrigal I feign not friendship where I hate for wind quintet: