Program notes for Kevin Raftery's compositions:

Two for Mirth

Naked Before God

Fourth Companion

Harpsichord Quintet

Meditations, for percussionist

Interlude, for string orchestra

Elegy Upon Elegy

Atlantis Dances

String Quartet No. 2

First Companion

String Quartet No. 1

Pleasantries

"Friedhof" Quintet

Trumpet Concerto

Concerto for 2 violins and small orchestra

Dimitte nobis

Cook From Frozen

Three English Poems



And some program notes I'm glad not to have written:
... musical objects of differing shapes shift in and out of focus while never truly revealing their focal point but rather describing a circular motion around it; initial objects and structures have been overwritten, rewritten and resequenced with those procedures taking on a relevance of their own as part of the compositional process.
... never has a piece been so obsessive, so obsessively devoted to finding the sound of the surreal, quantum world of the senses. From the external silence into a deepening inner cacophony where each motion, each blinking of an eye, is an event of music, I tore out what sounded to me like a folk-song. Its every gesture, motion, shape, its unfamiliarity, its faltering presence in my memory, formed the totality of this piece.
... weaves together a narrative that explores the search for meaning in an indifferent world.
... giving rise to states of harmonic resonance in which listeners enter into phaselocked codependence with the sound.
Very often the different voices overlap and different moments of musical lines can be heard simultaneouly. This approach is applied freely, almost as in a watercolour portrait depicting different historical musical moments and techniques. The idea that the musical material is based on explicitly different sounds is found in each section.
This multiplicity largely undermines the spirit of the original autonomous 'time slice' principle, leading to a sort of mirrored or negative hierarchy of material and form conveying a qualitative reformulation of the work's initial conceptual environment.
This is a panoramic serenade, open-ended in scope, to ride across, to ride through, on paths that cross. The music seeks its developing solution, the developing bath that is so often a precipitate.


The visual arts are not immune from this disease:
Can art create a zone of its own, one that transmutes the perishable properties of this world into a transcendent sphere of endless elements?