Revêtements

The score and parts for Revêtements, composed by Kit Armstrong. Arranged for piano trio in digital sheet music [EP14698].

Why do we talk and write about music? Can we get closer to understanding it? Are there some universal human criteria governing and engendering it, which we may hope to reveal little by little? 

We run up against what has seemed, for as long as music theory existed, to be an insurmountable obstacle: music is not only an art; it is a culture. Its core contains the accumulation of happenstance canonised by tradition, not justified by correctness or necessity. So a composer, while being a craftsman endeavouring to apply most felicitously his mastery of the art, is also a participant in a self-referential culture. A new piece of music may appear meaningful not only for an intrinsic value but because it invokes an association, in the minds of the initiated, with an element of tradition. 

Objectively, culture may fulfill a human desire to divide, providing a framework by which an in-group is distinguished from an out-group. Such is the character of traditions and "knowledge" that have no fully satisfying explanation, but just are. Subjectively, the sharing (in both senses of the word) of culture is a vector of human connection creating joy of a kind that, one feels, elevates and defines us. 

The particular joy of being a member of the "Haydn trios appreciators" in-group motivated my composition Revêtements. The feelings of playing through a Haydn trio finale for the first time, exhilarated, delighted, and entertained, shall remain with me forever, even as its surprises and incongruences turn into old friends. I pay my homage here with the help of quotes, sounds, and the form itself, a Haydn speciality quite fittingly described by the mathematical object of the title (called "covering space" in English).