hard against your earth (solos for Trumpet in Bb) 

Dedicated to Fabio Fabbri

Duration: 27 minutes

There is no programmatic intention in what unfolds as sound in this piece: any or no relationship to the title and the sounding music is forged at the discretion of the composer, performer and listener. Nevertheless, an unfolding of material manifests through contrasting music sections to provide the listener with a compelling experience without programmatic intent. It is the interplay between and within these sections that is the narrative content of the composition.

The work is comprised of twelve sections, each a free-standing solo. These solos are of differing lengths and characters. Performances or recordings may be constructed from a combination of all or any of the solos in the order they are presented in the score or reorganised to suit the performer’s requirements.
Solos linked by a shared number but differentiated through alphabetical additions, 1a, 1b, and 1c, for example, hold the closest material links and are ideally performed together in sets. However, material connectivity is not restricted. All the solos share their origins, with many connections being audible.

My compositional practice involves self-borrowing musical materials from other pieces and transforming those materials to generate new works. hard against your earth is no exception, with much material drawn from previous compositions, including each changing (2020), a collection featuring compositions for E-flat and B-flat clarinets. Those materials, in turn, are self-borrowed and transformed from the violin part of always searching for home (2020), a composition that immediately preceded this, and where those materials were themselves self-borrowed and transformed from the violin 1 part of the 2016 string quartet, observation 5.

Performed in its entirety, hard against your earth lasts around twenty-seven minutes. Its composite solos are apportioned as (solo timings are approximate):

1 3’38”
1a  1’07”
1b  0’52”
2  3’02”
3  1’36”
4  2’07”
4a 3’17”
5 1’30”
5a 2’45”
6 1’27”
6a 0’52”
7 4’15”