David Horne's Reflecting Instruments was the 2020 McEwen commision and was premiered by the Nanhai Piano Trio in the University Concert Hall on Thursday March 5th 2020. The piece is Horne's first for Piano Trio and explores the timbral and harmonic interaction of the instruments in the trio.
The premiere paired Reflecting Instruments with Beethoven’s Piano Trio - Op. 1, No.1 in E♭ Major.
Listen to… the Reflecting Instruments premiere
Programme note
David Horne - Reflecting Instruments
While I have a large number of chamber works including four string quartets, a piano quartet and two piano quintets, this is the first work I have composed for Piano Trio. It is fair to say that the wonderful Piano Trio by Maurice Ravel has always been inspirational to me, including as a pianist when I performed the work many times. While there are no direct allusions to that great work, I was motivated to explore a wide range of colour and textures in my own piece, with the trio frequently coalescing and separating texturally. As the title suggests, there is a great deal of interplay between the timbres of the various instruments and how they interplay, indeed reflect each other. From the outset the piano seems to echo and even resonate the sounds of the strings, though as the work progresses this relationship often reverses, with the strings emulating the harmonics of the piano, its pedalling and resonance. There is another aspect of the music’s language which will not be apparent to the listener but is worth noting. In much of my work I am fascinated by the nature of instruments and how their own idioms often inspire and lead musical ideas. This is beyond the notion of just writing idiomatically per se, but instead allowing the affordances of the medium being composed for to suggest content, including harmony and melody. One of my recent works is a chamber concerto for cimbalom and ensemble. This is an instrument that is impossible to write for unless you have a very good understanding of the layout of its strings, which is idiosyncratic to say the least. This can however yield fascinating harmonic results, and I wished to transpose the ‘template’ of the cimbalom’s layout onto the musical gestures of the current ensemble, while still retaining as natural an approach as possible to the ideas played by the trio. The result I intend, therefore, is a piece of music which works naturally for the piano trio but manages to nevertheless evoke something outside itself.
David Horne 2020
Performer biographies & full details of the Reflecting Instruments premiere can be found in the McEwen concert programme 2020.
David Horne
David Horne has written over a 100 works, receiving commissions from major soloists, orchestras and ensembles including Evelyn Glennie, Scottish Opera, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Nash Ensemble and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. His music is frequently commissioned and performed abroad, including recently at festivals in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Singapore and Strasbourg. He is active as a pianist and won the piano section of BBC Young Musician of the Year while a teenager. David is highly sought after as an educator and leads projects and workshops for major organisations across the UK. Boosey and Hawkes publish his work and he has been recorded on BMG and NMC labels among others. He is Professor of Music and Head of the Graduate School at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, UK, where he supervises research students in composition and performance, while teaching a wide range of topics at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.