Retroludes

Retroludes is a collection of piano pieces composed at various points between 2010 and 2020 or thereabouts, and all of them were ideas that I thought may have turned into orchestrated big pieces either for a classical ensemble or Verdris Moth or something else, but none of them felt quite right progressing beyond the piano.

 

The earliest of them is The Grey Waltz, an early version of which I composed during my years at Keele University in about 2010/11. I believe Snow In The Streetlights and Skyscrapers In Fog came next a couple of years later, when I was vaguely thinking of assembling these ideas into a set. All the rest came up during improvising sessions in the years following that. Many of them started as short seeds of not much more than 16 bars or so, and took years to finally get built up into proper full pieces.

 

I wouldn't say any of the pieces has a particular story behind it by which it was inspired, but they're all pretty expressive and hold a lot of personal memories, and they're all (relatively) short-form, hence "Retroludes", as in retrospective preludes. The artwork was taken from a drawing by Daisy Wake, a family friend.

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