Steps Volume 2 - Studies of Invention

Programme notes

BOOK I

Flying Machines evokes the products of Leonardo's obsession with birds and flight, and is full of surging, exuberant broken chords.
Sixty Beggars refers to a stipulation in Leonardo's will that his funeral cortège should include these among it. Mordents and rather smudged harmonies prevail amidst funereal tones.
Old Man with Water Studies relates to a drawing of a seated old man, probably a self-portrait, and adjacent, unrelated sketches of rivers in motion (all available scraps of paper being used!). My piece tries to mix both ideas.
Study of a Woman's Hands is a graceful drawing (seen by the composer in Leeds, when on tour); so this is treated musically to a berceuse-like lilting.
The Kite of the Cradle is an almost ecstatic rhapsody. Leonardo talks of his early memory of a hawk landing on his cot (highly unlikely, and he was just a baby, but it is symbolic of his conception of his gift's origins perhaps).

BOOK II

Tank is a truculent, rumbling piece in imitation of Leonardo's famous (but impractical) design.
Polishing the Imperfections in Glass, with slight tongue-in-cheek, refers to a machine for polishing perfect mirrors for use in telescopes; its gentle regularity perhaps partially reminiscent of a composer far from my own aesthetics....
A Moth to the Light was Leonardo's analogy of our pointless strivings in life, so this is a jittery, nervous scherzo.
Perspectives of Disappearance plays on ideas of the mysteries of drawing and of personal farewells.
La Scapigliata presents a delicate portrait of a young woman, with perhaps an enigmatic smile like a pre-echo of the famous one in the Louvre (....I am told by Prof Martin Kemp from Oxford University that this work is in fact spurious, though Leonardo-esque! In 2014 I turned a corner in a museum in Parma, and there she was!...).

BOOK III The Existence of Nothingness stems from a philosphical analysis of what lies between past and future. My movement has an ambiguous, slightly unstable emotional quality. The Impossibility of Perpetual Motion is a whirring but somewhat "lumpy" tarantella: Leonardo realised that motion was always ultimately constrained by friction. Lenses for Looking at the Moon tries to create the half-glimpsed view of another plane of existence, newly available to astronomers of the time. Study for a Deluge is a portrayal of power but of a rather noble kind, inspired by Leonardo's series of drawings on the forces of nature unleashed. The massiveness of the turbulence requires four staves! This is the Way Birds Descend provides a fluttering, hovering, yet passionate reflection of Leonardo's lifelong obsession with flight and the study of nature's aviators. Like Beethoven's last sonata, it departs amid a sea of trills.

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