Mysterious Flowers

Piano solo

The first movement burst into bloom, so to speak, from a discarded fragment I had composed years earlier in 1979 while I was trying to get ideas for a short ensemble piece written as a fiftieth birthday tribute to Peter Sculthorpe.
The second movement, dedicated to Ross Edwards, also sprung unexpectedly from material that had lain dormant for some time. The initial chordal idea, and the mysterious tones spread right across the keyboard, were left over textures from my Three Meditations for Dane Rudhyar (1984); and the high arpeggiated chordal idea is a mutation of the call of the magpie lark,... 
The third movement, dedicated to Lucinda (aka Helen) Edwards, appeared from nowhere like a desert flower after a storm. I was improvising at Lucinda's piano in Paddington, while I was waiting for a delayed flight to Bali, when the piece materialised from the tones of Messiaen's second mode of limited transposition (also known in jazz theory as the diminished scale). 
Composed 1998

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ISMN 9790720171012

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