MISADVENTURE ON A CHILDHOOD TUNE
In 2018 I was the honoured recipient of the Queensland Conservatorium’s Silver Harris and Jeff Peck Composition Award, which takes the form of a commission. This year I’ve been fortunate enough to write for the Queensland Conservatorium Symphony Orchestra and conductor Johannes Fritzsch.
My piece, Misadventure on a Childhood Tune, is my tribute to the first piece I ever learnt to play on the piano: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Originally known as ‘Ah, vous dirai-je maman’, this melody has been the subject of variation-ing for centuries by the likes of Camille Saint-Saëns, Franz Liszt, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart among others. For me, this tune was (and still is) the subject of many a nerdy singing-game in my friend circles.
In Misadventure on a Childhood Tune you’ll hear the tune backwards, inside-out, with the note values reversed and with intervals sorted from smallest to largest amongst other transformations. The opening is a chaotic nebula - a cloud of space dust and the birth of our star - on a chord made up of every interval in the tune stacked vertically on top of each other. It accelerates into a vivacious tune (actually the original tune played backwards!) which is brought to a halt by a repeated rhythm made of the original rhythmic values turned inside out. Some woodwind 'shooting stars' bring us to a dreamy inversion of the tune before erupting into a final supernova to end the piece.
Misadventure on a Childhood Tune will be performed alongside Ives’ The Unanswered Question and Strauss' epic Ein Heldenleben at 7:30pm October 16th 2020 in the Queensland Conservatorium Concert Hall.