Notebook entries relating to the development of TURN for cello and tape, commissioned by Amy Jolly.

This piece was a new challenge for me – while I’ve written variations before, I’ve never tried to work with someone else’s material, and Amy had particularly requested that my piece develop my own research in some way as well as hers, which proved harder than it felt it should have. The piece has been through several changes of direction and several periods of interruption for various reasons, but is now nearing completion (September 2021).

TURN is also closely tied to Quiet Songs, HAYDN SPACE OPERA and Accretions, so there’s a few points where comments about those pieces’ developments reference TURN and working on those other pieces also developed how I was thinking about TURN. All the crack drawings relate to the concepts in TURN, even when their text does not, or they also relate to other pieces.

Work on this piece began in 2017, so the beginnings of it date from before I started working regularly in the altered books. The record is therefore incomplete before 25 March 2019. The first entry here is a response to experiments with degrading the original score by iterative photocopying, which can be followed through into the Britten altered book volume, and suggested the crack drawings which became very important in developing how I thought about the relationship of what I was doing in relation to the pre-existing content of the Britten Tema.

In development (this content therefore is incomplete).