BACH est mort was written in 2002 while I was still an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin. It’s one of only a handful of pieces from this period that I would stand by, largely down to the purity of the compositional approach. There is a sense of single minded focus and purity to the material, and form, even if I do expend all my ideas at break neck speed, with little time devoted to allowing the material to speak! It is this move towards purity of content and form that I hold on to, it is the equilibrium I continue to strive for in my work.
The harmonic material for the piece is derived from the sequence B-A-C-H (the resulting pitches being B-flat, A, C, B from the German, as first used by J.S. Bach in ‘The Art of Fugue’), and through assigning pitch to the latter half of the title ‘is dead’. The title and inspriation for the piece came from an article I read by Pierre Boulez, called ‘Schoenberg est mort’ [The Score, volume 6, May 1952, 18-32].