...prayer beads, ornaments, maquettes, vignettes, miniatures, haiku, poems, stanzas, chapters, scrapbook, outlines, fragments, sketches, impressions, imprints, colours, flavours, fleeting visions, windows, doors, openings, portals...

In our hands we hold a bag of marbles, which we remove, one by one, in order to examine them more closely in the light. Within each and every orb, although small, we see a unique blend of colours, of forms, of impressions which in themselves contain a world infinitely more vast than the marble itself.

Each movement deals with just one small idea, developed or reflected on within very limited confines. Some places we are left to dwell in for a short time, others we are whisked through just long enough to glimpse its nature. The movements strive to be visual, tactile, to take shape and form before the mind's eye. Structure and development remain inconclusive, fragmentary or loose throughout, continually subservient to the evocation of an impression.

'Vignettes For Flute & Oboe/Cor Anglais' is dedicated to my Nan, Doreen Joan Gavrielides.

I – Perpetuum Immobile – the humming of a current forever passes back and forth, sometimes swelling, letting off sparks that give an ever-shifting hue to its otherwise constant nature.

II – Copycat – in a flat, grey landscape, two voices echo one another closely in a steady, monotonous rhythm, singing a strange and hollow song.

III – Sprites – two tiny, winged creatures dance nimbly through the night air, tracing a path in the darkness with their luminescence.

IV – Contours – with words, there is always more than one way to say the same thing. The language of music is no exception. Slight variants in contour allow the two voices in this piece to talk excitedly about the same melody, yet each in their own way.

V – Colloquies: Repartee – sometimes talking nonsense can lead to the most surprisingly colourful and spontaneous conversations.

VI – Colloquies: Chinese Whispers – other times, during an exchange of words, you may find yourself simply repeating things you heard elsewhere, the message becoming more and more distorted as it gets relayed.

VII – Pulsations – different waves within the air solidify into sounds, their out-of-phase frequencies beating against one another in a gentle hum.

VIII – Winter – A Monody – the slumbering body of winter lies heavy upon the land, its laboured breathing punctuating the phrases of a static, frozen melody. Slight variants between the two voices create a gentle sustain.

IX – Rounds – two lively, staccato voices spell out reams of broad and cyclical arpeggios, continually sidestepping and chromatically shifting, transforming their sonic space with fresh harmonic colours. Patterns of accents borrow their initial relationships from the nested sequences of the silver mean, before folding them over and over in ever-morphing lattices of tumbling rhythms.

X – A Man Offguard – a suggestion of those moments of mental absence when you are alone and your mind wanders... and so, the man offguard: his ambling thoughts as he potters alone in his house; his train of thought becoming distracted, drifting off; the outlines of a tune mumbled to himself; the banal workings of his subconscious; his quirky habits when no-one else is around; momentarily he loses the flow of the melody, and fumbles about crudely, searching for the correct pitch; then, all of a sudden, an intrusion from the outside world, breaking abruptly through the privacy of his solitude: the phone rings...

XI – Machine – a hoard of extended techniques are employed to imitate the whirring, heaving rhythms of industry in this miniature study of the voice of the machine.

XII – The Boundary – microtonal inflections colour a melody shared between the two voices. Towers of notes reach up in ever smaller intervals before tumbling back down again into the general flow, drawing the outlines of soaring harmonic spikes in the air.

XIII – Perpetuum Mobile – a whirling dirvish of continuous, cyclical harmonics, passed from voice to voice. The kinetic antithesis to the opening movement, and a final return to the very first pitch of the suite.