Premiere of Equivalence performed by David Palmer at the Milton Court Concert Hall in London.

This work responds to the series of photographs taken by Alfred Stiglitz in the 1920s, entitled Equivalents. The Equivalents (initially titled ‘Music’) are a sequence of cloud photographs which represent a significant development of photography into the realm of abstraction: there is no horizon line, no orientation, merely the texture and colouration of the cloud. Commentaries on the Equivalents notes the importance and new importance of the photographic ‘cut’ (‘the effect of punching the image, we might say, out of the continuous fabric of the sky at large’ (Krauss 1979)), in achieving a destabilising effect within the viewer. In Equivalence, large dissonant chords (using the extremities of fingering) are subject to a ‘cut’, like in Stiglitz’s photographs, leaving a triad as a kind of resolution. The destabilising effect is felt on iterations of the linear material, increasingly disintegrating yet paradoxically becoming more deliberate. Totality is implied through the use of every major and minor triad throughout the piece, played in sequence at the end of the work (albeit in a randomised order from their initial presentation).