Lithium

Lithium is a collection of short motives that overlap, permute and develop for solo piano – four strands of melodic material played in a variety of tumbling voices across the full range of the piano, create a collection (rather than a suite) of contrasting moods and shapes and explore metric modulations, and making use of the polytonal and twelve-tone technique.

The character and structure of the piece were determined by the repetition of a number of pitches and rhythmic groups that are like characters that concentrate on the material of three hierarchically prominent chords, which increase in importance as the piece progresses. Two of these are tetrachords and the other is a hexachord. Because a sense of tempo relies on firmly established pulses at regular intervals, much of the unambiguous passages in the piece occur when metric modulations occur during metric modulations, it is at those transitions where these rhythmic identities become clear.