A couple of interests have been particularly prevalent in my music over the past few years. The first is an attraction to sectional forms. The second is the use of predetermined systems to govern compositional decision-making. At times such systems take the form of deterministic processes that strictly prescribe events. Other times they provide general rules for development while leaving some parameters open to intuition, either by composer or performer. Flap Jackson is reflective of both of these interests. It contains three distinct musical identities that follow their own processes of development, producing clearly defined large-scale structures. The three identities are interleaved such that recurrences of each function as sections of the holistic form. A unique quality of interleaved structures is that returns to an identity are better described as continuation than repetition or variation, and consequently, the full development of each identity only unfolds over the duration of the piece. When those developments significantly transform the characters of identities then dynamic relationships are likely to emerge between the musical sections. The piece ends with a solemn fourth identity that is derived from previous material and functions as a coda. Flap Jackson is one of a number of pieces exploring the use of interleaved structures to create sectional forms. It was composed at City University, London in the winter of 2002.
