1) 1976 and 1980 origins of Starmilk
Starmilk is an unusual piece for me, it has a verse structure, one of the only times I have used that.
Anita Woolf offered me a house concert in Hampstead in spring 1980, and I invited Tamar Swade – a wonderful South African lady who had/has a great musical sensibility, to perform with me 2 specially composed 4-hands piano pieces, which were Starmilk, and, I think, Wheel no.1. The concert was shared with the young Mexican flautist Hilda Parades, and was very well received. Hilda has since become more known as a composer.
Starmilk was grown from a seed piano phrase, first improvised in 1976. The original phrase was an 11 beat phrase but had a very “easy to add to” sense to it. Starmilk is built on a 14 beat cycle that starts like the earlier figure but adds extra notes/beats. This phrase was the seed for Starmilk and my first solo cello piece “Scotland” both written in early 1980. None of my other compositions sound remotely like them.
Summer 1980 saw my first trip to the USA, where I performed in Vermont, Texas, Arizona and California. I took the piece with me, being fond of it, and during the tour experimented with making it playable for 2 hands. Each concert had a slightly different version. By the end of the tour I had a 2 hands version that I felt conveyed the awe of the 4 hands extremely well.
I have continued to play Starmilk, in that form, up until the present time, but it was a great delight when Rome pianist Alessandrta Celletti picked the piece out (from music I sent her) as something she wanted to perform. I was delighted she both understood and loved it. Her mother also liked the piece and painted “Starmilk” which was given to me as a gift when Alessandra came to perform at my 8th Planet Tree Music Festival in November 2011 in London.
It is curious that the last time I played it in the USA, in San Francisco, was in the state where this release of Alessandra’s CD would take place on the LA Transparency label, courtesy of (the late) Michael Sheppard, 33 years later.
When I play I have strong feelings about what should happen to the surrounding atmosphere. The title Starmilk is my way of describing a charged atmosphere, where a translucent white mist forms, conveying the immensity and expansion of spacious sound