Matthew Rowan - Composer

2007 --
for solo viola

Release is in response to Peter Maxwell Davies’s First Grace of Light for solo oboe. After hearing Davies’s composition I immediately realised that in retrospect my own work for solo oboe, In The Presence Of Absence, was perhaps too rigid and methodical in comparison to First Grace of Light, and I set out to write a composition - this time for solo viola due to fortunate opportunity - addressing these issues. Although the meditative style of First Grace of Light partly influenced Release, Davies’s positive use of silence is challenged in two ways: by using silence to interrupt the flow of the phrases instead of silence having equal importance as the phrases, and by substituting the breathing effect of silence for sustained pitches. The fluidal structure of Release is achieved through applying an improvisation process used to produce the television series created by Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm. For each episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm there is the idea, the outline, the improvisation, and then the editing; I followed a similar pattern in creating Release. The main difference between Release and other pieces I had composed is that I used my main instrument – guitar – to improvise not only the pitches the composition was to consist of but also any phrases that could be used. By knowing the idea and the outline of Release I was free to create improvised material that could then be edited together to make the composition while retaining a clear structure