Echoes and Embers

Echoes and Embers is a work that explores an intimate relationship between clarinet and piano. Quiet, delicate textures are heard in both instruments, interspersed with silences that serve both to puncture and connect material. Resonance, echoes and a blurring of elements are a primary feature of this work, leading towards an impassioned climax where tension is both released and accumulated. There is an inherent ambiguity to the work: the compositional procedures can be viewed as doing two separate things simultaneously. The material can be both an echo of something heard, a dying ember, and something that serves to have the potential to awaken and become more important.

Echoes and Embers is dedicated to my friend Joe O’brien.

© 2016 Mark Simpson