Mesophase was written as part of the ‘Nine Echoes’ project, a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Douglas Lilburn’s birth. Each short commissioned work in this project was written as a response to one of Lilburn’s Nine Short Pieces, written in the 1970s. The social, cultural and personal conditions that surrounded the creation of his piano miniatures are slowly receding in the rear-view mirror of time: thus, while I echoed Lilburn’s chords and pitches in this ‘response’, they have been subjected them to a kind of sonic ‘melting’, rather like those poor dreamclocks in Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory.
The resulting ‘mesophase’ (a scientific term referring to a substance caught halfway between a solid and a liquid) is, perhaps, a metaphor for the transitoriness of all human musical endeavour, though we should neverthless celebrate its occasional ‘re-solidification’ in the wonderful ephemerality of live concerts.