Paraphrase, which is my first piece for organ, was written in 1971, when I had recently left the Royal Academy of Music and was living alone in a raggle-taggle thatched cottage in Wiltshire, earning my daily bread by teaching the piano to schoolchildren.

It is a set of variations on a part-song by Thomas Tallis called O ye tender babes, and lasts about eight minutes in performance. The Tallis original is not heard at the beginning; but the first variation is simply a decorated version of it - a nod to the decorative variation technique of the Elizabethan virginalists - including Tallis himself and my lifelong hero William Byrd. This is played on the manuals, with occasional disruptive and impolite interjections of a flatulent nature from the pedals. Four genuine variations follow this; these depart abruptly from the Elizabethan sound-world, but are audibly derived from the Tallis. With the miraculous advantage of more than fifty years' hindsight, I can detect the influence of the young Peter Maxwell Davies of the Pierrot Players  period in my young voice. After a loud, violent climax and a cascade of passagework reminiscent of Olivier Messiaen - whose Paris class I joined unofficially five years later at his private invitation, and whose influence upon me (both as man and musician) has been immense - a calm final variation brings the music back to the Tallis. This time the melody is in its original, undecorated  form; but I have punctuated it with quiet, high clusters; and so Paraphrase comes to a quiet end.

Giles Swayne