The Centre is Everywhere

While composing this piece I was giving a lot of thought to the space of a piece of music; how within a piece of music we can become aware of foregrounds, backgrounds and numerous planes in between. I also have an enduring fascination with the interaction that takes place between the physical space of a performance and the interior/mental space within each of us, where vibrations of air are perceived and held in the memory. The more that I make music, the more richly mysterious I find this process to be.

The movement of sounds and ideas around the space of an ensemble of string players was integral to my thinking about this piece. The twelve musicians create together a layered musical space through which interlocking patterns of sound emerge, accumulate and disperse. The music is replete with overlapping lines that rise and fall, moving from hushed white-noise to wide, full-bodied sound and back again in wavelike motions.

The title comes from an anonymous medieval definition of God as ‘an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’. The beautiful intangibility of this image captured my imagination when I first read it and made note of it years ago in an old notebook. It came back to me early on while thinking about this piece and somehow guided my decisions about how to shape the music.

© Edmund Finnis