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Programme Note

Everyone tried to act surprised when it was revealed that the Reagan administration had illegally traded arms for hostages in Iran and had shipped weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua. It seemed that every day in the New York Times there would be a new story about this covert operation or that secret deal and I read all these articles with fascination.

I remember one article in which an unnamed source derided the administration for dealing with an agent on whom the CIA had put out a BURN NOTICE, meaning that they had declared this person wholly unreliable. It seemed to me that reliability could also be a musical issue - when a piano takes over a melody from a cello, for example, the cello trusts that the piano is conveying a worthy musical idea and not a useless scrap, while the piano trusts that the cello speaks its language and is willing and able to follow. The idea of unreliable instruments building an intricate structure out of something as musically meaningless as the chromatic scale became too tempting for me to pass up.

- David Lang