Steps Volume 10 - In a Grain of Sand

Steps Volume 10: In a Grain of Sand - piano solo - duration c. 56 minutes - 2022-23

When grains of sand are greatly magnified they reveal an unseen and surprising complexity of form, shape, texture and colour - for example see here. No two grains are the same and their multiplicity provides hidden worlds of great beauty and interest. In this volume of my Steps series each piece is derived from a single chord in some way - perhaps it simply provides an opening, or its character suggests a harmonic sonority, or its intervals seed a melody. The chord is stated and is, as it were, the everyday, mundane overview of the grain of sand - the ensuing piece unlocks, by "magnification", the treasure within. It is the player's choice as to whether they actually sound the chord.

Beyond the (unimportant) "compositional mechanics", the aim of this Steps set, as with all the others, is to conjure little worlds of feeling and expression: to paint a picture; to ponder a thought; to evoke an atmosphere.

My friend, the pianist and poet Oana Rusu Tomai, provided me with two beautiful verses inspired by this same stimulus and concept. Cunningly, they do the same as my pieces in that each line provides an independent, contrastingly characterised title, yet they also coalesce to form cohesive wholes. The first is predominantly exultory, the second reflective. The cycle is dedicated to Oana.

I look through you at the sun
You ignite your own fire
Reverberate through hidden mossy chambers
Long stony corridors and marine gems
Patiently rethinking the world
Dissolving like honey on God's tongue
With a nonchalant gesture you put to my eye
A lens of magnificent refractions
To my ear, a curious sound
First, a rumbling, then, surrender
At last, the beatific moment when you fly in the air
With a stellar whoosh…
A wonder that does not know of itself
As all marvels are, innocent
Of aggrandizing and human drama
Spending of itself inexhaustibly
In prisms of glory and enigmatic hexagons
A grain of sand is a sun
Much closer to us than any other revelation planets.

II.

A letter full of breaths has arrived
A nameless sender's courtesy to me
The hand is puzzling, grains of sand
Pour in the heart, and plunge in opened earth
Time is passing without progressing
The sundial memorializes someone's joy in a return
Stunned language of silence, unvoiced throat,
Pigments of longing infuse our reunions
Who has been calling all night
In the realm of air and water?
Watching with eyes of wild birds
Breathing with lungs of tuft and grasses?
Shall I call you a Shadow?
Lithe body of quiet revolt
Your sleeves are as light as sails
Quickening a boat towards darkness
The river of love and death is ready to swallow
Our pleasure trips into what caused us pain
A silver fish's splash submerges in a last lingering chord.

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