Work

Programme Note

While making this piece, I was enthralled by my daughter’s experimentation with language, at the age of nineteen months. Recognisable English words were freely mingled with streams of idiosyncratic verbal utterance, and while meaning was often obscure to adult ears, patterns of words and sounds were repeated in a way that was clearly linguistic. The title of the piece is one of these patterns, which she used frequently, and which I am still unable to translate. To me, such playfulness suggests musical processes. Almost from birth, the toys which most held her attention were those which made sounds. In response to this, I had recorded a collection of the toys which had most fascinated her around the age of seven months. Nearly a year later, the sounds finally accumulated into a musical shape. I can only dream of recapturing for myself the inventiveness of a young child, but the observation of the child’s manipulation of sound and meaning leaves its traces in my work.