Mirrors for piano solo (1989) Amsterdam

Mirrors 

for piano

The title of this piece came to me at an advanced stage of composition, when I read a text by Pierre Boulez ‘Composers and Creativity’ in which he states that the composer sees himself alternately in two ‘mirrors’: the mirror of technique and the mirror of imagination.

Each piece had a very precise technical problem at the outset: here using a certain scale (several octatonic scales in III), or a certain fragment of a series (I and II), there a group of durations and a group of notes of different dimensions (the colour/ talea of medieval music) (II), here a complex polyrhythm (III), a filter of durations (III), rhythmic transformations by multiplication or division (II), using two contrasting themes from the same notes (I), there a vague formal idea, etc.

Regardless of the starting point, of the particular technique used, the composer's gesture was always determined, in the final analysis, by the earing criterion, by the will to act or not...

April 1991