Pete Stollery: you're a fisherman's bassoon [download]

You’re a fisherman’s bassoon was composed for Lesley Wilson and FagottOctet, who gave the first performance on 3 November 2017 at St Andrew’s Cathedral, Aberdeen as part of sound.

The eight performers should be spread across the middle of the performance area in a slight semi-circle.

Whilst shopping in Tesco, Westhill, with my wife in early 2016, we caught site of a friend. He approached us and my wife greeted him with the phrase, “Hey, you're a fisherman's bassoon!". At least, that's what he thought she’d said. In fact, she’d said, "Eurovision must be soon!". I thought, there and then, that this would be a great title for a piece about half-hearing and misunderstanding.

During the summer of 2017, I became uncomfortably fond of winning songs from the Eurovision Song Contest from 1956 to the present day, having spent a great deal of time listening to them in depth. They became my earworms throughout most of that summer and it was usually the ones I hated - Brotherhood of Man’s Save Your Kisses for Me (1976), Johnny Logan’s What’s Another Year (1980), Dana’s All Kinds of that would wake me up in the middle of the night, but I began to wallow in the mock-Baroque chord sequence of the refrain from Lulu’s Boom Bang-a-Bang (1969) and the intense harmonic passages in Conchita Wurst’s Rise Like a Phoenix (2014), both of which feature strongly in the piece. In fact, no less than 34 quotations from past winners appear; some of them might be instantly recognisable, but many will be half-heard, at most.

The piece also examines techniques of group dynamics, union and fragmentation (at global and molecular level) and may indeed be connected with concerns about Brexit.