Much Balding In The Marsh

Description

This piece was written for Elisabeth Hobbs for use on her Flutes Inspired courses for adult players.  I worked with her on a jazz flute day with one of her groups and this had taken place in Marsh Baldon in  rural Oxfordshire. This peculiar name kept buzzing around in my head and eventually collided with the memory of a classic BBC Radio comedy show, Much Binding in the Marsh.  So, as the piece progressed I was happy that it took on a bit of a vintage, jaunty, radio comedy lilt, with a fairly episodic structure – themes coming in and out, perhaps like characters in a comedy – although I wouldn’t go so far as to say the piece is ‘humorous’.  The harmonic and rhythmic language is somewhere between jazz and ‘fusion’ whilst, I feel, maintaining a sort of BBC archive decorum.