Chris Swithinbank

For a while now, I have been in­ter­ested in the edges of things: where things start and stop being, where they van­ish, where one idea bleeds into an­other. This piece at­tempts to com­bine found sounds and streams of ‘noise’ that we carry with us in the back­ground of our lives - ra­dios, pop music, con­ver­sa­tions, re­mem­bered places - only oc­ca­sion­ally glid­ing into focus as we pass by an open door, with a more ‘ab­stract’ mu­si­cal dis­course. Far from going on a nos­tal­gia trip, I want to ex­am­ine the way we re­mem­ber, the way we share our ex­pe­ri­ences and how every sound we will ever hear will be im­bued with con­nec­tions we our­selves may not be able to ver­balise. The cre­ative act seems to me to be a con­stant re-eval­u­a­tion and pro­cess­ing of all our ab­sorbed ex­pe­ri­ences, re­con­fig­ur­ing these into a mu­si­cal con­stel­la­tion — a com­muning with our per­son­alised ver­sions of what the Re­nais­sance Neo­pla­ton­ists might name the ‘world-soul’ or Schopen­hauer the ‘will’, but with­out the meta­physics. We can­not, and should not want to, es­cape our myr­iad ties to his­tory and to each other, nor should we em­brace these blindly, but al­ways go on think­ing, think­ing and re­think­ing.

The cello part of Mikrokonz­ert was writ­ten for Alice Pur­ton and it was pre­miered by her with the Va­ganza New Music En­sem­ble on 16 May 2010 at the York Spring Fes­ti­val of New Music.