Mouvement

I wrote this slow, 12-minute movement after my daughter Betsy suffered a stroke in March 2018. It damaged the area in the brain where speech, reading and writing are located. Her upbeat determination to fight back drove me to write this almost Beethovenian music and was rewarded with a near complete recovery in less than a year. This involved a rigorous training regime on other parts of the brain to take over.

The question why I took recourse to such an outmoded idiom to respond to the occasion I cannot answer. Some subconscious trickster must have pushed the musical buttons and took control of my instinct. At this stage in my career, however, I don’t care anymore about the ‘correct way’ of communicating in music or about the expectations of the musical literati as long as the effort comes close to expressing a deeply felt empathy.

Tetbury, September 2018.