The title of this short work, especially written for the Mifune Tsuji Trio, comes from an unlikely source. I came across a publicity brochure for an early twentieth-century Pianola, or player piano, in which the anonymous author wrote of that instrument’s ability to fill the home with ‘brilliant bursts of climacteric splendor’, a phrase that seemed to me as well-crafted as anything that might have come from the pen of the most distinguished of poets. The piece is influenced by two composers who, it seems to me, shared a love for the kind of intricate musical patterning that a Pianola is capable of, namely Gustav Holst (1874–1934) and György Ligeti (1923–2006). The ostinato from Holst’s St Paul’s Suite can be heard running throughout the piece, a simple melodic figure that generates all of the other musical material that is heard, and which is transformed and extended à la Ligeti. The final section introduces the Hampshire folk-song, ‘The Scolding Wife’—collected by George B. Gardiner and set by Holst in 1909—which is presented at multiple speeds before it finally breaks from the constraints of the ostinato, bringing the work to an abrupt, and slightly off-centre, finish.
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