Theme & Transformations by Mark Bowler

Joanna Twaddle - cello
Victor Braojos - piano

First performed 3rd May 2019 at Silk Street Music Hall, London.

Composer's note:
In October 2018, the World Wildlife Federation published The Living Planet Report, which contained a bewildering fact: humanity has wiped out 60% of mammal, bird, fish and reptile populations worldwide since 1970. That figure is an average; for south and central America the figure is 89%. A 60% decline in human population would be the equivalent of emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania. Even with a human-based comparison, the scale of this decline is difficult to comprehend.

Theme & Transformations contains a reductive structuring principle, informed by the Living Planet Report statistic, which plays out over seven movements: a theme and six transformations. Each transformation contains 60% fewer notes than the previous movement but is otherwise near identical. The removal of notes forms the basic transformative process, but as the piece progresses, some pitches are transposed by octave and the duration, articulation and dynamics of other notes are altered. The first movement is energetically polystylistic and contains over four hundred and fifty notes. Any inherent stylistic plurality dissipates as the piece progresses, and by the sixth transformation only two notes remain.

This piece is not programmatic nor a direct political statement, but a creative exploration through which I gained a clearer understanding of how a rate of change of this magnitude can affect a musical environment.