Hommage was my contribution to a joint project amongst staff and students at Cardiff University to write a work inspired by the instrumentation used in Henri Dutilleux’s Citations. The individual compositions were then bound together as a collection and given to the composer on his visit to the University in 2008.
It was an honour and a thrill to meet the composer at the University Music Department and to see him presented with an Honorary Fellowship at St. David’s Hall. But my knowledge of the composer’s music was not as great as it is now. So my inspiration for the piece came from a work by another composer, Continuum by Györgi Ligeti. I have often been inspired by his music, and so this piece became a sort of homage to him too.
Though it is highly chromatic it is inspired by a simple harmonic progression that ‘resolves’ in the last bars. In the same way the relentless semiquavers are marked by abrupt changes of time (real and implied by accents) that resolve into something more stable at the end. All this is highly compressed into a little piece that, quite literally, goes by in a flash…