Pianobox
Pianobox was written for Marcus Andrews, and it was first performed by him on 29 January 2009 in Notting Hill Community Church, London. The recording below is of this performance.
Download the Score here, or buy a hard copy, printed on high quality paper and spiral bound, on Etsy.
Listen (lasts about eight minutes).
My walk to work while I was writing this piece took me past a building site in central London. This building site was very cramped: all the plant and materials had to be unloaded on the street outside, then lifted by crane on to the site. One day, while walking past, I saw a skip, 30 metres up in the air, being craned into the site to be filled with rubbish. Ah, I thought, a floating skip – and so the idea for this piece was born.In my head, the image of a rubbish skip drifting through the air merged with the other sense of 'skip', which is itself a leap through the air. In this piece, it’s the musical phrases that skip, and these skips don’t always land back on the ground when you expect them to.