Bach's Inkblots

After a thorough immersion last month in String Quartets World and then off to the opera house, I'm now crunching musical-mental gears for a premiere in Oxford next week with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, under the direction of John Butt.

This new piece has been commissioned by the Bodleian Library, to celebrate their acquisition of J.S. Bach's original score for his Cantata 128 Auf Christi Himmelfahrt. That's a cantata for Ascension Day whose opening movement (to which my piece will serve as an overture) features upward movement all over the place, including two crazily leaping horn parts. Accordingly, I have titled my own new work Upwards.

It's been a pleasure to have this unusual link with one of the world's great libraries. As part of the commission I presented the Bodleian with my own handwritten score, and even the sketches - which I felt, on handover day, were going to look rather scruffy in the home of the Winchester Troper etc. But in fact the Bach manuscript is also notable for its hasty writing and scribbles; so in that respect I can say that I'm following in Bach's footsteps/fingerprints/inkblots.

PICTURED - from the splendid city of Hildesheim last week (in Niedersachsen - Bach never made it here.) The text on the building says, prophetically, "Zuerst stirbt die Wahrheit/dann sterben die Menschen".