Miles Away (from Beyond The Notes)

1997/2004

Arrangement for piano and string orchestra

Duration 8’

Material also used in 3rd Movement of Boom of the Tingling Strings (2002)

Jon Lord’s programme note:
Written sometime during a summer in the nineties. Back home after much travelling. In my garden, half asleep, In the shade of a great old tree, leaves murmuring in the warm gentle breeze while the distant sounds of a lazy afternoon drift in and out.

I suppose I daydreamed this music while lying there and it has become a ‘painting’ of how I was feeling on that beautiful day, with my mind still halfway across the Atlantic. I think maybe the jet lag must have had something to do with the time signatures of the main theme – 5/4, 4/4, 6/4, 5/4 and 7/4. In fact, when I first jotted the idea down, the working title was “27 Miles Away” because those bar-lengths add up to 27. As the man who took all this clothes off and jumped on a cactus said – “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Incidentally, I used some of this material for the slow movement of my piano concerto Boom of the Tingling Strings (2002), but here, pretty much as it floated in under the chestnut tree, is the full Monty.