When I composed the piano trio recorded here, I named it after one of the seminal works of this kind, a collection of suites by Johann Hermann Schein called Banchetto Musicale. Banchetto Musicale is a collection of twenty suites, each made up of five dance movements. These became the first famous works of German instrumental chamber music. But, atypically, Schein published his collection in 1617 with a preface in which he claims that his suites are also designed to be related sets of matched movements, not just series of contrasting dance types. Today, we live in a world of unbridled heterogeneity.
Eclecticism rules the aesthetic roost.
But my abiding interest was always to find ways of binding disparate things together. Hence, a banquet. But these movements are placed between others with a very different kind of Baroque reference, called fughettas. This title is also used loosely, but the bits of imitative counterpoint found in these movements do play an important role in creating my version of what Schein aimed for so long ago. With more than a decade's hindsight, what strikes me most about my work is the way in which it uses jazz, ragtime, rock and other popular musical languages.