At the end of 2011 I completed a 'virtuosic' solo piece for the pianist Zubin Kanga, which he premiered at King's Place in February 2012. The piece, Orfordness, is named after a shingle spit on the east coast of Suffolk that was used for secret military testing from the first-world war until 1993, when it was acquired by the National Trust. Each of the short movements of the piece is based on one of the mythologies that surround the area, including the mysterious evacuation of a nearby village, a secret over-the-horizon radar system, an alleged UFO encounter, and the testing of Britain's first nuclear weapon. The collaborative process in the testing of ideas and development of techniques has been recorded, and Zubin and I gave a presentation about the first two movements at the 'Tracking the Creative Process in Music' conference in Lille in September 2011.
