Beschreibung
‘Sciamachy’ means shadow fighting or battling with an imaginary enemy, usually for practice or exercise but possibly owing to paranoid delusion or quixotic fantasy. So my piece is a both an etude and a fantasia.
In 2010 I composed ‘Suspense’ for solo saxophone and this new piece (and also my saxophone quartet ‘Swan’) draws extensively upon that earlier work. The process is analogous to painters who recycle old canvasses by painting on top of earlier discarded works; some trace or influence of the original remains. I understand that composer Wolfgang Rihm occasionally uses a similar technique of ‘overwriting’ in his work, taking a line of music and adding new layers around it, not for economic reasons but further to explore the idea and bring new layers of meaning into existence. But whereas Rihm leaves his original unchanged, in Sciamachy the new writing – mainly in the piano – is allowed to influence and modify the old according to contextual demands at any point.
Sciamachy is in two parts, slow then fast. Both sections feature processes which allow the music to gradually unfold, the themes revealing themselves one note at a time but in very different ways.