The “Quis est Deus?”, or Questions of Ethne Alba, is a medieval Irish lyric, with the calm but pointed, sometimes disconcerting, tone of enquiry – a kind of flinty innocence – characteristic of the early church, and of the ordinary person’s conception of belief at that time, when a deity’s invisibility did not lessen His claim to material reality. For reasons now obscure – I’m a reverend agnostic – the poem made an impression on me in the early 1990s, and I appended a version of its informal title to a suite of solo piano music written in my late teens.
In fact, the suite had its origins as several different pieces of music, some of them for voice and organ, some for solo organ, others for piano. I still have the scores for all of these: some strike me as playable; others I have to imagine in my head, which is what I did when I wrote them. Truthfully, I can’t remember how much was composed at the keyboard and how much on the hoof.
“Echoes” is a recording made at a friend’s house in Bath in 1991 by the producer David Lord. I found the master cassette a few weeks ago, in a box of old programmes, photos and postcards, and had it digitised. As you can hear, I played an old piano (not the one in the photograph, but similar), with slightly off damping. The scores for the various pieces were all laid out in front of me, and I went from one to the next, improvising a little where necessary, but mostly sticking to what I’d written. I don’t know if Ethne Alba would have appreciated them, but here are my answers to his Questions.