Water and Stone is not a programmatic piece – if you hear fluid water like passages and hard granitic textures, they are unintentional.
The stone represents the fixed, solid and concrete, the water the ephemeral, uncaptured and untameable, abstract. Apollo and Dionysus. Head and Heart. God and Humanity. And despite or perhaps because of their opposite nature, water and stone are often found together – the pairing was much loved by artists and romantics: a stone falling into a pool, the babbling brook over the riverbed, waves crashing on cliffs…
When I named this piece I had thought that I had been working on a new idea – but it turned out to be the same conundrum as rises many of my other works. It can be loosely categorised as ‘the state we’re in’ as composers in the Western Classical tradition: namely that we – composers, or at least those of us less than 700 years old – write a score, a fixed entity, but we create something – a performance – which is temporal and essentially impossible to recreate.
This piece is, therefore, an experiment in time, exploring a sense of spontaneity and abstraction, treading the line between the formed and the formless. The events of the piece – what we tend to call its ‘structure’, or ‘where the music goes’ – are in musical terms conjoined and held together by concrete ideas and techniques. But the music unfolds in short sections, each running its course with a single idea and then stopping without further development, recap, or any other self-referencing markers.
The individual sections have loose titles: Abstract, Canon, Scream, Dances, Shift, Duet, Romance, and Lament. The duration is about 18 minutes.
It was a great honour to be commissioned a new work in memory of Briony Gimson, and it is dedicated to her.