for solo piano (2004-05)

Duration: 7'

Written for John McCabe

World première: John McCabe (piano), Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, UK, 22nd June 2006

Reviews

"Her Sky and Water was inspired by an M.C. Escher drawing in which birds morph into fishes. It tumbles with a starry, sometimes dissonant profusion of glinting and glimmering writing... It ends in an enigmatically twinkling glow. It is very impressive in the hands of the dedicatee, John McCabe."

"Emily Howard (a Liverpudlian like McCabe) is perhaps these days not so much up and coming, as arrived: her Sky and Water…cerebral, sparser, linear, the realization in pianistic terms of an idea of ascent and descent."

"Howard's Sky and Water (2005), its title owing to M. C. Escher's wood etching – fish and birds appropriating one another – opens with an arresting gesture ... and flourishes both contrapuntally and dramatically."