Michael Jarrell

The word 'rhizome' is a botanical term referring to the underground travelling stem. From one end grow new branches and new leaves, while the other end withers. As is demonstrated by its etymology, it...

The literary text, present in ...car le pensé et l'être sont une même chose... as in Formes-fragments IIb, nonetheless seems to enjoy a slightly-different status in the later piece. Though no great my...

Rather than adopting the well-known practice in certain 16th-century polyphonic music of superimposing temporal planes, this work aims to superimpose or overprint various semantic planes to be found b...

Modifications was written for the Ensemble Contrechamps and Claude Helffer. The score is a direct reference to the eponymous novel by Michel Butor, and is inspired by some of its principles, namely th...

This is a tricky exercise, for the performer needs to move forwards as well as backwards, to move to and fro, not really following any path, although he sometimes strays from Assonances, as in Berio's...

It is From the Leaves of Shadow (1991) that gave birth to ...some leaves II... for solo viola. The presence of e 'mother-note' (D) confers on the piece some auditory landmarks, especially as this sort...

As with Prisme (2001), Offrande for solo harp is taken from a concertante work for harp and string orchestra entitled Conversions* (1988), but is further distant from its origins. While the cadenza fo...

Michael Jarrell's series of 'Assonances', like Berio's 'Sequenze', is basically cyclical, although the pieces are not necessarily written for solo instrument. The composer himself considers them rathe...

Congruence, from the Latin congruere, to agree, is a geometric term: "when all the points of two superimposed figures coincide, they are said to be congruent", reports the composer. The plural of the...