In the mid-nineteenth century, somewhere in the southern states of America, an old slave sits picking at a guitar, and trying to recall half-forgotten tunes which he heard and sang as a young boy, back in his family's village in West Africa. The melodies gradually return to him as he pieces the notes together, and the work passes through a series of short contrasting sections on a voyage of remembrance.

During the first half of the 1980s I had drastically trimmed my musical language, eliminating harmonic clutter and dissonance, and restricting myself almost entirely to a modal sound-world and audibly physical rhythms - often related to my deep and  abiding interest in African music - though never consciously attempting to imitate it. Canto for cello, Magnificat I, Riff-raff, A song for Haddi, Symphony for small orchestra, Naaotwa Lala and MIssa Tiburtina are examples of this period of radically reduced vocabulary.

By 1986, when I was working on Solo, I had achieved the purpose of washing out the ears of my musical imagination, and was ready to re-enter (very cautiously) a broader sound-world. Solo remains largely within a modal context, and much of it is purely pentatonic; but the mode is gradually transformed and extended as the piece goes on; and eventually all twelve semitones are in play. This process of change seemed to me an apt musical reflection of the tragic human subtext of the piece.

Giles Swayne
2025