| Notice (en) : |
Early in 2002, Concerts M in Montréal commissioned a new work from me for the “Voyages: Montréal-Dublin” festival. Working in my own studio with the creative possibilities of music software which captures sounds like a freeze-frame in video, making sound movement stop, or go forwards or backwards slowly, I composed a 12-minute piece, Passades, which was premiered at that festival in March 2002 (“Irish music — if you say so” was the newspaper headline which covered the festival). A Passade is an equestrian term meaning to move backwards and forwards over the same space. Seeing great possibilities of exploring this technique further, I continued to work on the Passades, sketching out 2 hours of material, in mainly 2 and 3 minute sections. The process has been to try to find connections between them even as they proliferate. The result is a series of sets containing 3 or 4 related Passades each. By the Autumn of 2003, 49 minutes of them were finished (4 sets plus an Opening and Closing), although I tend to find important small connections in pieces which need time to be discovered, which greatly improve them — revising pieces several times before I think of them as being really finished. Several more versions followed on a monthly basis until the version you hear here was completed on New Year’s Day 2004. |