IN LATE LATE NIGHT (I THANK CAGE) (2014)
While planning a 60th birthday present for Sinan Savaskan, I’d been thinking for sometime about what might be a suitable tribute to him, and was planning something completely different, when he emailed me – late one night, quite out of the blue – this acrostic poem which he had written following the death of John Cage.

It struck me that this text was a perfect match for the ensemble of his piece Septet – 2 voices, 2 flutes, 2 strings, all held together by the harp. My piece tries to capture the way in which we can read the unique strands of the poem simultaneously: the soprano (paired with harp) sings the horizontal aspect, while the mezzo soprano (coloured by flutes and strings) sings the vertical aspect.