'Like Distant Bells and Half-Heard Songs': Transfiguring a new repertoire for piano during the dark days of the first national lockdown in 2020 I felt compositionally moribund, paralysed by the inertia of the confinement combined with regular missives about the super creativity of composer colleagues via social media.
Amidst this gloom and navel-gazing came the opportunity to write a short piano piece for pianist Duncan Honeybourne's 'Contemporary Piano Soundbites' where he premiered a short new work every weekday for nearly two months, all via YouTube on his gradually disintegrating home piano (a metaphor for much of what was happening at the time). This was one of the few times I felt creative and useful during this difficult period, and I was very thankful for this opportunity.
Later in the year, Duncan recorded my short work 'The Turtle Dove' along with many of the other soundbites for CD release, the reviews of which were extremely positive. One of the reviews referred to my piece as 'A hushed and hauntingly effective deconstruction of the ballad of the same name', another 'But, alongside those names one meets Phillip Cooke with his beautiful transfiguration of the wonderful folksong The Turtle Dove.' It was the latter of these two key terms that began the compositional process and aesthetic, and this short piece has now resulted in over eighty minutes of music all searching to transfigure and reimagine pre-existing material.
But what does 'transfiguration' mean? Or what do I take it to mean? Well, in its broadest sense it is a complete change of material from one form into a more beautiful or spiritual state - in many of these short pieces (or movements) I seeks to do something similar, taking the existing material and transfiguring it into something more ethereal and mystical. This act of composition has been present in my pieces for a long time, but it has only been recently that I have realised that it is a concept with deep resonances and significance in my work. The process began with the Folksongs, which I subtitled 'studies in transfiguration' as they not only suggest the beginning of a process, but also that the very nature of the change of form is often slight or ephemeral - the opening of a door to another mode of being or thinking. Later works carried on this process, with the final work (Theme and Transfigurations) taking a short extant piece of my own and transfiguring aspects of it into something entirely different.' Phillip Cooke November 2022
