Description

The dedicatees, Larisa and Fabio, knowing of my long-standing interest in folk-music, and the history of its problematic collection and publication – sometimes in the form of ‘settings’ for piano – asked me to set some Slovenian folksongs for their festival in Ljubljana. Fabio sent me a selection of excerpts from ‘ethnomusicologically approved’ publications, from which I made my choices.
These song-melodies, with slight – but hopefully idiomatic – alterations, appear here in typeset notation, with their texts. My composition (subsequently writing through) explores and digresses from these with reference to Tchaïkovsky, Balakirev, Grainger, Bartók, Prokofieff and Xenakis.

Michael Finnissy