In the early October 2021, while on Vancouver Island on the west coast of Canada, I went to collect some piano music from a gentleman in Victoria whose wife, a pianist, had passed away. Within the music that he gave me was The Seasons Op.37 by Tchaikovsky. The set of 12 short piano pieces for each of the months are a lot of fun to play, with June (Barcarolle) being the only piece with which I was familiar before hand. As it happened I took a real shining to the piece for October and played it almost everyday during October and it was from this that an idea emerged for a performance of the work, in a purely personal sense, that would link each piece to its month. The idea was that from the new yearI would play each piece once a day for its respective month without prior practice (ignoring of course the previous playing of October and June with which I was already familiar) nor preconception and see how my performance of each piece developed over the month. There was the superficial element that my playing would of course improve by the final day of the month as I became more familiar with the piece, as with the majority of the pieces I would being at sight-reading them, but what was far more interesting, at least to me, was the changes in the way I would approach the piece as the month went on in relation to what else was going on in that month itself. This would of course have been a purely personal experiment with no notation of what was going on, no recordings and certainly no public performance.

 

While this idea was one that I enjoyed, an idea that I developed from this that I enjoyed more than this was the one of writing my own pieces for orchestra for the months but using this same system of discipline that I had come up with for the playing of Tchaikovsky’s. That is only being able to write that month within the actual month, and once that month is completed being unable to ever make any changes to what had been written, despite how bad, unfinished, etc. the final product of that month may have been. From this the idea then grew to write these pieces not following the traditional calendar, but instead to do so following the Pataphysical calendar. This work was completed from the 8th September 2022 until the 7th September 2023, with 13 orchestral works being written for each Pataphysical month.

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Duration 1hr14minutes 

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Minimum Orchestration

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4 Flute (1 doubling on Piccolo)

4 Oboe

4 Clarinet in A (1 Doubling on Bass Clarinet)

4 Bassoon

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4 Horn in F

3 Trumpet in Bb

3 Trombone

2 Tuba

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3 Percussion

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Strings (solo Violoncello for movement II)

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