Inventions and Sinfonias (2025)
Organ
Duration:
65’
First Performance:
TBC
Score
Programme note
The collection of pieces that comprises the Inventions and Sinfonias have resulted in my longest piece to date and the most concentrated spell of focussing on one instrument since my Transfiguration project for piano (2021-22). The work takes Bach’s monumental work of the same title as its inspiration, though the great master’s influence on the work is more formal and structural than anything musical or artistic. Bach’s work was designed for his students to learn two and three-part contrapuntal keyboard music in a creative and interesting way, fashioned from his own style of composition. Bach composed the two-part (Inventions) and three-part (Sinfonias) in ascending keys from those widely used in the period (eight major and seven minor keys). These two facets (the pedagogical and the tonal) are preserved in my Inventions and Sinfonias, mirroring the key structure of Bach’s and aiming these pieces at good players still on their instrumental learning journey.
The work deviates from Bach’s in its very musical substance, this is not an hour-long treatise in contrapuntal music – I have neither the skills nor ambition of my predecessor in this department – any attempt to write like this would have undoubtedly resulted in cod-Bach at best, something unlistenable at worst. But I did like the idea of having more contrapuntal, quicker, thinner and more agile music for the Inventions and something more homophonic for the Sinfonias (here dwelling more on the idea of a Sinfonia as a ‘sounding together’). I married this with different combinations of manuals and pedals for the different pieces (there are three pieces for pedal solo in the collection) so as to give a full range of technical exercises for the player. Although the pieces follow the key structure of the Bach, my use of these keys is obviously very different to the Germanic leviathan, often inhabiting modal and chromatic worlds closely related to these keys. Some begin and end in the home key, some don’t – all relate to this key in some fundamental way or another.
Although the work is titled Inventions and Sinfonias it could easily have been titled Media Vita, a title I played with from the work’s very inception. This discarded title has a bearing on the composition for two reasons. Firstly, that it dawned on me that I would be entering middle age whilst writing the piece (apparently, middle age begins at 45), something that seemed relevant when considering the second reason for the potential title, that all of these thirty pieces are based in some fashion on pieces I had written during the past seventeen years (some of which were composed when I was definitely not middle aged). That isn’t to say that these are arrangements of existing pieces in any fashion, they certainly aren’t, but they are revisitations or reimaginations of some of the material found in those works. This carries on the ideas utilised in the Transfiguration project, but rather than taking material and trying to mould it into something more spiritual and beautiful, in the Inventions and Sinfonias I am trying to find new ways of expressing the shapes and contours of the previous music and shine a different light on the ideas within. Some of the pieces that are revisited can be heard prominently, some are much more oblique, and some are represented only by a chord or a fragment. Some of the pieces are from the very beginning of my composing career, some are from a few months ago. This sense of reviewing and renewing my whole creative journey to this point helped to make this feel like the end of one chapter and maybe the beginning of another. Maybe a middle chapter.
PAC