Martin Butler - Fixed Doubles

for full orchestra. Fixed Doubles was commissioned by the Royal Northern College of Music, and was completed in the summer of 1989. As a student at the college, I attended all the concerts given by the symphony orchestra as well as many of its rehearsals. This was good training. As a result, I became familiar with a large chunk of the orchestral repertoire (I particularly remember one frighteningly exciting performance of the Rite of Spring) and learned more about how an orchestra works at that time than at any time since. Fixed Doubles is an energetic and joyful response to those years at the RNCM. Essentially, it is an 8 minute moto perpetuo; the pulse and movement rarely slacken. Against this, the ideas flit in and out of one another, almost always in canon, contracting and expanding, and inhabiting a fairly static harmonic space they are circular, immobile in this sense fixed'. Doubles' hints strongly at the playful nature of much of the music. Eventually, there is nothing to do but stop, on a loud, brassy major 2nd. 9780193620971