Cities And Memory

The development of this piece was particularly complicated for reasons I can’t fully explain. I tried various jumping off points, taking sections of the initial harmonica melody, and working on that with counter-melodies, call and response, writing on melodica and piano, working with voice, manipulating the original melodic phrasing, and nothing stuck for quite a while. Then I left the ideas alone for some time and began working on a parallel piece for the Cities and Memory Autumn Project and this helped free something up….I continued by retuning, and taking individual notes from the original recording out - keeping some of the melodic phrasing intact, but slowing it down and spacing it out. This forced a more mellow approach overall, and at this point I took a lot of elements back out again to give more space. At the same time, I worked with Nicky, my collaborator, on developing piano parts and this really helped to ground the work. From then onwards it was a much smoother process, and I could intuit a dire