One day, while staying in Tiny House, my refuge on my daughter's property. I was going through my collection of scores to find inspiration. When I found a book with twelve of Henry Purcell’s Fantasias for four viol da Gamba, this wasn’t what I was looking for, but in the end, I sat down and decided to listen to recordings of them.

That Is Something Else, I said To Myself.

When I had listened to them, the idea was clear. I would do Metamorphosis on a couple of them. Maybe three or four. 

The orchestration for all of them will be a Stringquartet and a string orchestra. The string orchestra consists of three violins, two violas, two cellos, and one contrabass part. Preferably, I’d see a minimum of two players for each part, to get a fuller sound from the strings.

I set up the score and arranged the first seven bars of one of the Purcell Fantasias. And then the composition came to a standstill for a couple of weeks.

How Would I Dare To Use Something So Perfect And Make It My Own?

The question was buzzing in my head, not ringing through every time I opened the score and tried to write a continuation. I procrastinated the whole thing and decided to give a couple of other fantasies a go. But none of them hit my sweet spot like the first one!

But in my head, I could hear the continuation of the first piece. One early morning, I had it, I let the strings come in with cluster-chords in F#Maj modulating over to AbMaj9/Eb. And from that point on, there was no return other than to finish the composition.

Stitching My Soundworld Together With Purcells

I’m letting the stringquartet play most of the snippets from Purcell’s composition. And the strings are commenting on my sounds and coloring. It’s not a strict division, rather a suggested one. 

After two days of intense work, the composition was finished, and it ended up being almost seven minutes long.  And you find it on virtually every streaming service now.