On Wednesday 15th September, Trio Northumbria performed the premiere of my piece for string trio, called string trio fragments at this year’s RMA Annual Conference, held at Newcastle University. This short piece was written in response to a call for papers/pieces; the challenge I had given myself was to compose a piece that had been generated from another piece of mine, an unperformed short piece for solo viola called the quick of it.

However the piece soon took on a set of concert for itself and became far more fragmentary than the viola piece. Here I composed short rhythmically repetitive moments focusing on bow position and limited pitch material (often capturing non-octavising harmonic chords). The piece is often very quiet; a by-product of concentrating on the bow technique and harmonics/non-harmonics in this way allowed these sounds to be heard as if they had their own location in the space.

This is the video of the whole concert; string trio fragments be heard here, beginning at 22’20”: