Gallimaufry

Notes

Gallimaufry derives from the 16th-century French galimafrée, meaning literally a hotchpotch of different cooked meats. As such, it’s a suitable title for this third dozen of pieces, sequel to A House of Ghosts and A Room at the End of the Mind. Whereas those two sets laid only tenuous claim to any unified creative purpose, or to the right to be played together in a group, Gallimaufry makes absolutely no such case at all, being an unashamed gathering-up of otherwise homeless fragments with little, if anything, in common. At times its contents stray into the territory of pastiche, as in the somehow Irish-inflected Romanza [no.4] and the Medtner-like Alla Reminiscenza [no.7]. At others a sense of place or of person lies behind the music. The level of technical difficulty for the player remains secondary and subject to purely expressive intention, yet poses more frequent challenges than the pieces in the preceding two dozens.