Tiento

for solo harpsichord

Mike Vaughan (1993)

Tiento

Tiento is one of a series of solo works dating from 1985 which are all concerned in some way with the manipulation of elementary patterns and the generation of a specific type of performance energy. Tiento uses techniques associated with the baroque harpsichord to develop musical ideas using two contrasting strategies: the creation of textures which are essentially introspective and which are constructed by the expansion or ornamentation of single events, and a more conventional ‘low-level’ patterning aimed at revealing higher levels of structure. Using these two approaches it seeks to explore the border between the surface quality or ‘grain’ of continuities (or textures) and the gestural character of their constituent parts. Tiento was written in Spring 1993 for Jane Chapman.