When I was asked to compose a piece as a concert-partner for Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra I was keen to write the antithesis of a concerto, involving all the players equally, performing as one unit. Two very different examples of this attitude came to mind: the brief moment at the end of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale (1918), where the violin blends into the percussion before vanishing and Steve Reich’s early 1970s loop-based compositions, Clapping Music and Six Pianos, written after his trip to Ghana, where he studied drumming. It seemed logical to allow the influence of Reich’s modernday hocketing and Ghanaian-infused rhythmic ambiguities to permeate the periphery of my own piece as I knew that the musical culture of Ghana is at the heart of ensemblebash. In addition, I decided to give a ‘nod’ to Stravinsky in the very opening violin chord, forming the basis of the first section which gradually shrinks with each of its three re-occurrences. While the background pulse remains constant, the use of accenting and modulated time signatures creates a permanently shifting beat which is itself affixed to a broad sectional arrangement not dissimilar to a classical rondo. Fragments also marked my first experimentation with the music of North Africa, specifically Algerian Raï. Ideas hinted at here, went on to evolve greatly in subsequent compositions, Raï and Sevens. It was interesting for me to watch how Fragments grew out of such geographically and musically disparate stimuli. But, as Steve Reich wrote in his 1968 seminal essay, Music as a Gradual Process, ‘all music turns out to be ethnic music’.

Commissioned by ensemblebash and Madeleine Mitchell for their first concert 21.4.05 Turner Sims Concert Hall, Southampton.

Instrumentation: violin, marimba, vibraphone, glockenspiel, tam-tam, 2 gyile, 3 gongs, 2 triangles, cymbal, high hat, tambourine, 3 cowbells, woodblock, bongos, maracas, 4 tom-toms, snare drum, bass drum.

from notes by Tarik O'Regan © 2007