Humans seem to function best in social groups of fewer than 150 people. We tend to stay in regular contact with just a few individuals within these villages, and often cope poorly with larger crowds.

The 'village' notion first arose as I pondered how to design a composition without any of the usual landmarks. How could coherence be maintained without the recognisable boundaries of movements, without a central stockpile of major themes, and without the formative principles of exposition, development and recapitulation?

What emerged is a 'village' of ideas, cast as twelve independent episodes using unique but related motifs which evolve organically across the work. Melodic interconnections slowly develop that mirror the webs of relationship making up the 'villages' of our lives. The architecture is deliberately loose, but the episodes relax in energy and tempo near the middle of the work, intensifying at its close.

The Village was commissioned for Musica Viva Australia by Julian Burnside AO QC, to mark my sixtieth birthday. It was first performed by the Sitkovetsky Trio in Newcastle, Australia in 2014.

© Carl Vine, October 2013