Hilary Robinson

Pieces of Pieces
for violin and piano

duration: 15 minutes

Pieces of Pieces are six superficially contrasting but interconnecting movements for my own instruments, violin and piano. The movements share both structural and audible components which are transferred and transformed throughout the work as a whole: some are explicitly cross-referenced, others migrate surreptitiously from one level to another out of earshot, as melodic fragments are compressed into harmony, rhythmic durations stretched out as larger-scale structural determinants, and so on. Rather than constructing a mosaic of instantly identifiable elements, in Pieces of Pieces I aimed to challenge the listener to a game of "hide and seek", with glimpses of the familiar, shadowy allusions to half-remembered scraps of musical material, and ambiguous, metamorphosed references.


Hilary Robinson was born in Lincolnshire in 1970. She holds Bachelor and Master of Music degrees (the latter in composition, with distinction) from Manchester University, where her teachers were Geoffrey Poole and John Casken. In 1993, she began three years of study at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki with Anders Eliasson and Eero Hämeenniemi, funded in part by the Tillett Trust and a Finnish Government scholarship. She later had several private consultations with Kaija Saariaho, in early 1998.

Her music has been performed by various groups in Scandinavia and the UK. Five, a quintet, was shortlisted by the SPNM in 1997. She lives in Finland, composing, teaching English and working as a freelance language editor. In addition, she writes for Motion, a London-based Internet magazine devoted to the promotion of progressive music of all genres.

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