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Maps and Diagrams of our Pain
Maps and Diagrams of our Pain was inspired by a long standing fascination I have with psychiatry, in particular the study of obsessive compulsion disorders ,a disease wonderfully described by one expert as a hiccup of the mind, which compels the sufferer to repeat seemingly meaningless acts and to think repetitive and disturbing thoughts. This would seem to suggest in obvious musical terms the use of ostinato, but I believe this misses the point of the particular pain of the disorder, in that each repetition of the action fails to capture the identity of the initial action which evoked the ritual. In other words, it is the fact that the actions are not repeated, or rather repeated imperfectly that creates the tension which is hopefully reflected in the work’s struggle for a rhythmic and harmonic stability which is never quite achieved, even in the elongated coda. The title is partly an allusion to another form of obsession, one of dimension. The fear of small things seeming large and large things looming small, microscopes and telescopes, the fact that one piece of paper the size of this page can contain both a map of the world and the schematic of a microchip. Near the beginning of the work, as volume increases more details emerge, details which encourage harmonic development. Structurally the work is the dialogue between these two obsessions and the self-generations that this dialogue produces.
Maps and Diagrams of our Pain is dedicated to Yannis Kyriakides.
Instrumentation
violin and piano
First Performance
Miekko Kanno (violin) and Tom Armstrong (piano) Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 1998.