Commissioned by: Schönberg Ensemble, with financial support from the Netherlands Fund for the Creation of Music
First Performance of first version: Schönberg Ensemble & Gerard Bouwhuis, December 2000, Paradiso, Amsterdam. Cond. Micha Hamel
First Performance complete version: eNsemble, 2001, St Petersburg, Russia
Instrumentation: piano solo + flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, French horn, violin, viola, cello, double bass, 2 percussion.
Duration: 16’
Special Features:

Score samples

Info/Program note:
3-pt. Melodies, Variations & Objects was written in the year 2000, during an extended stay in the southern part of England. At the time, I was somewhat inspired by various folk musics and sought to capture some of their rugged edges in this piece; a ‘dirt-like’ feature which is especially prominent in the first sections of the piece.

Like its immediate predecessor, 3-pt. (untampered) Product, the work makes use of ‘objects’: small, defined, musical motives which, in this case, serve mainly to ‘objectify’ the rampant proceedings of the rest - and are accordingly placed in between and at the end of the two main sections.

Scored as a kind of Piano Concerto, with rattling objects placed all over the strings for the greater part of the piece, the 3-pt. Melodies are an exercise in hyperbole: how far can one go before the material auto-destructs and the ‘Objects’ enter? In this way, the first section consists of extremely frenetic scale-figures, cross-cutting through registers and eventually exploding into a kind of circus Fanfare. After an interruption by a sequence of ‘Objects’ a second section follows, which consists of an extended Chorale over two alternating fundamentals. This too gradually expands, until destroyed again by Piano clusters and resolved by the Objects.