Disappearance

Simon Rackham

‘Disappearance’ was originally composed in the early 1990’s and performed once (in the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall) under the title ‘The Disappearance of All Saints into the Sea’ a reference to the church in Dunwich, Suffolk. The original piece also included two vocal parts, that sang the same notes as the piano right-hand part and used hand

‘Disappearance’ was originally composed in the early 1990’s and performed once (in the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall) under the title ‘The Disappearance of All Saints into the Sea’ a reference to the church in Dunwich, Suffolk. The original piece also included two vocal parts, that sang the same notes as the piano right-hand part and used hand bells. In this version the vocal parts are omitted and there are a few other minor changes. ‘Light’, was also composed in the early 1990’s and has recently been reworked with another section added. It is unusually chromatic but has a constant octave E in the bass line throughout. ‘Canon For Two Pianos’ is an arrangement of a piece for four voices originally composed in the 1990s. It consists of four lines of music (roughly 1 minute 48 seconds long) heard in the sequence: 1, 1 2, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 4, 2 3 4, 3 4, 4, so the last part sounds quite different from the first section. ‘At The End of The Rainbows’ was composed in October 2021, for piano 3 hands. The top hand plays mainly in quavers, the middle hand in crochets, and the low part mainly in minims. As with most of my music it is composed using a diatonic scale (in this case E flat Major) but here there is more of a feeling of conventional ‘changes’ but it never actually modulates. Occasionally it goes through a circle of fifths or fourths etc. and the last part alternates between E flat major and C minor.

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