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Gwyn Pritchard: Janus Janus was a Roman god whose head had two faces looking in opposite directions; an image which serves to describe the nature and behaviour of much of the musical material of this piece. Its purely musical origins lay in my wish to explore linearity, and different forms of opposition and tension that can be generated between two linear instruments. At times the two faces of the music are polarised, locked into diametrical opposition; and at others, each persues a musical course obsessively independent, even oblivious, of the other.Janus
is a formidably difficult work, which deliberately demands of the performers an
almost impossible degree of control of detail, particularly in its microtonal
and its textural aspects. The consequent instability is analagous to a drawing
in which the imagery is described by a profusion of linear movements. This is a
direct consequence of writing the piece under a picture donated to me by the
distinguished Polish painter Jerzy Stajuda, to whom the piece is dedicated. It
is also dedicated to the brilliant Swiss duo: Philippe Racine and Ernesto
Molinari, for whom it was composed in the Autumn of 1991, commissioned with
funds from South West Arts. |