Revisiting this work from 2017 and preparing it as part of a live set has made rethink a lot of things about it. Maybe also having a better understanding of it. Like I have said elsewhere, this started life as part of a series of drones that were created as sound design beds for a production of Romeo & Juliet. I created solo lines for the drones for fun really, each note of the melody being played when it occurred to me to play it. An exercise of listening to what something wants to be.

Thinking about drones. One thought was to create pieces of one note, where the timbre evolves through time. The timbre being made through the change of the balances in the sequence of harmonics. Octave, octave +5th, two octaves, two octaves + major 3rd, two octaves + 5th and so on. So the different notes 'played' are part of the changing timbre of the fundamental. This harmonic sequence is that of an idealised pipe or string, the harmonic sequence of 2d or 3d objects, like bells, is far more complex and unpredictable. So it is possible to throw in notes outside the harmonic series to effect changes of timbre. I guess it is the attitude with which they are played and how this allows them to subsumed into the underlying whole.

So back to the piece originally called 'Meditation I' then 'Invocation I'. Originally, I felt that this was a drone with asynchronous layers of phrases and textures with a solo line placed against and on top. Now it feels that it is one continuous note whose timbre evolves through time. The asynchronous phrases and textures being techniques to allow this evolution to happen. All the notes in the resulting melody are already there in the parts that make up this changing timbre. The melody or solo line is not something added on top but something that emerges from the underlying evolving whole. Like sitting at the bank of a fast moving stream, running, splashing and dancing over rocks and roots. At first it seem like one monotonous roar, but after time voices and songs start to emerge, or rather they don't emerge - they were always there - we tune into them.

So maybe a better title is 'The River'. Water plays a symbolic/metaphorical role in a lot of my music so these realisations or crystallisations make a kind of sense to me