Description

The ‘cut-up’ is, in literature, extensively explored in the early writings of William Burroughs – most famous for ‘Naked Lunch’. There, initially conventional sentences are fragmented (cut up) to convey (or suggest) the heightened, alienated, mind-altered and even deranged, experience and sensibilities that result from taking drugs. The technique of dividing and separating musical ‘material’ into component intervals, motifs, pitch and durational configurations has a long history in Western European music, certainly (if not always explicity related to mental or emotional disturbance) as far back as inter alia Byrd, Gesualdo and Mudarra. These pieces – studies without shame – relay my discoveries as a student during
the mid-1960s in ‘swinging’ London.

Michael Finnissy