My Piano Trio is about acceleration and deceleration. Throughout the first half, musical lines in the cello and piano parts constantly speed up or slow down relative to one another – largely the writing is constructed of long chains of linear intervals, so that fast material comes as a result of the acceleration of slow material (and vice versa). The fluctuating speeds return in the second half, although the two instruments are more independent, adding lines or figurations at will and joining periodically with the violin. The violin has only one role – to accelerate throughout the Trio’s fifteen minutes. It begins by only playing every 30 seconds or so, and inexorably speeds up until a sort of ‘vanishing point’ is reached at the end of the piece.

Psychologically, small accelerations or decelerations relative to a basic speed can seem like huge deviations in subjective time – even minor changes to the instruments’ metronomic speeds prove unsettling to the listener because humans intuitively feel that a clock ticking (or even accelerating) at a constant rate will remain at that rate. The Corpus Clock in Cambridge is a clock that plays with exactly this perception. Completely accurate every five minutes, the clock lurches unevenly from second to second, the grinding mechanism driven by the terrifying metal insect escapement known as the ‘Chronophage’ (from the Greek meaning ‘time-eater’).

Performances: