QUESTIONS

Variations in music highlight transformation and continuity, while mirroring reflects duality and ambiguity. Mirroring can make the familiar seem strange, inviting the listener to question the relationship between the original and its reflection. In this sense, mirroring is inherently bound to the idea of duality: a musical space in which two perspectives coexist.

The spherical nature of musical exploration, with its variations and mirrors, suggests that endings are inextricably linked to beginnings. Each reflection is an opportunity to see the familiar anew. Traces of marks and patterns, played out over time, vary in their retracing. Whether shifted compositionally or in the alteration of aural expectation.

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In the process of a third movement of my Wind Trio, a pulling-together of threads is sought. To attempt to navigate a sonic landscape. To reach a sense of wholeness. Not, to reference Julian Barnes, a more formalised “sense of an ending”. It is to repeat elements and to explore these. To both use and to create a mirror. That is, of what was but what also might be.

Are these patterns worth breaking?
Is a pattern worth breaking?
What if it does?

“The end is where we start from…” – TS Eliot


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