Score on special sale from the Hire Library

Take a piece by Rameau with a particularly unappealing title ('Le Lardon' - literally 'the lump of lard', a piece previously used by Paul Dukas for his Variations, interlude et finale sur un thème de Rameau), change the clefs of the music in both hands between treble and bass more or less at will, do not change any of the positions of notes on the staves, nor their rhythms, slow down the tempo massively and add selected octave doublings to the left hand part.

Such were the improbable bases for this solemn, somewhat processional work which became a gentle study in slow motion keyboard agility. The literary minded will have little trouble in seeing this bizarrely strict procedure's origins in the work of the French writer Raymond Queneau and his colleagues of the OULIPO, who explored various kinds of creative writing constraints. My main aim in Misreading Rameau was to transform the rather plain Baroque original into music using the types of piano harmony and sonority I enjoy.

Julian Anderson