Bells in the Rain

I’m in the middle of writing a post on my latest orchestral piece, Building Blocks, but I thought I’d quickly post a link to my contribution to the Art Song Project – Bells in the Rain.

I was inspired to write the piece when I came across (and subsequently fell in love with) the poem of the same name by Elinor Morton Wylie. As I improvised at the piano while contemplating the words, the opening piano accompaniment motif came to me, from which the rest of the piece emerged.

Interestingly, there are a few common themes across my works at the moment which seem to be becoming staples of my ‘current’ compositional voice (I say current – I believe all composers’ compositional voices are in a constant state of flux, but these are trends that seem to be running through this phase). One of these is the interval of a tone (here used as the first interval in the piano accompaniment motif; often used in clusters featuring intervals of a tone in other pieces). The other is the concept of changing between simple and compound time signatures, which occurs for the second stanza of the poem.

I’d like to thank the wonderful Hélène Lindqvist and Philipp Vogler for their wonderful performance, and for featuring my piece.