New Bloom

John Oliver

New Bloom was written at the request of Canadian flutist Robert Aitken. The work features the flute in a solo role, carving out a line constructed by a backwards-variation technique, a line whose material in every variation is derived by cutting up the original material, which itself only appears at the end of the work: thus the "new bloom." The string parts create reflections around the flute part using special techniques such as pizzicato, harmonics, sul tasto, and sul ponticello. The presence of these colourful sounds in the musical fabric is controlled by individual temporal evolutions, with a noticeable emergence of the sul ponticello and normal playing, directly duplicating the flute line, near the end. The work was inspired by the idea of the journey of a young shoot through its transformations into a flower.