PROGRAMME NOTES

Five Early Pieces for Solo Piano

(1955-56)
1. Contemplation 1
2. Invention 1
3. Contemplation II
4. Invention II
5. Contemplation III

These pieces were all written in my last year as an undergraduate at Cambridge, where I was organ scholar of Queens’ College. For Part II of the music degree there was a three-hour exam paper in composition and the two inventions were actually rehearsals done in that time at a sitting. The first Contemplation survives only because my first piano teacher, Miss Constance Haslam, kept a copy. The second one was also destroyed but I remembered most of it and used it in Sonatas for Piano (1987).