shards - Julian Grant

Composer: Julian Grant Instrumentation: Clarinet, Cello, and Piano Duration: Approx. 9 minutes Date Written: 2008 Additional Information:  From 2000 onwards I have written a host of piano pieces, almost like keeping a little diary, or musical journal. The pieces are mostly tiny and have been collected under the title shivereens, which is an old colloquial Scottish term for fragment or shard. Some pieces are written on the spur of the moment, others are excerpted from longer works, or tangential jottings on musical ideas used elsewhere. Shards consists of four of these pieces, dressed up for clarinet, ‘cello and piano. diminishing returns is a technical exercise where two little ideas, a motoric theme and a repeated chord figure are presented alternately, yet throughout the piece the repetitions shorten, diminish, and collide. The original material comes from my opera the uninvited from a market scene in south London that ends in a riot. on hearing an aria by handel is a little elegy in