Landscape and enchantment

Music expresses the desire to touch and shape the world, and yet its shapes and forms are ephemeral and invisible.

Musical pulse exerts itself powerfully, organises us, and makes us want to move. This is a form of interaction. Interaction, belonging, movement, form.

Musical repetition is highly emotional because it connects directly to the sense of the eruption of memory, and gives a sense of renewed and even unexpected meanings. Musical repetition can be intensified by powerful and architectural spans of harmony.

This is what happens in my clarinet concerto.

An initial landscape is sketched in the opening.

The clarinet is the human casting around in the landscape.

The music goes on journeys.

The second movement is like a voyage through different places, underpinned constantly by the sense of restlessness and change.

The third movement is buoyant, but at the end the opening landscape returns, as though recalled from a distant memory, suddenly back again, clear and radiant, almost super vivid and dreamlike colours.