Overpainted harmonies

Overpainted Harmonies was one of the final works of my master’s degree in composition and forms the first movement of Overpainted Music. Inspired by Gerhard Richter’s overpainted photographs and landscape poems by Clark Ashton Smith, it treats harmony as layered paint: a musical ground is gradually covered, revealed and transformed by other harmonic fields. Instrumental colour, glissandi, harmonics and fade-ins and fade-outs continually shift the listener’s perception, while a brief allusion to Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie connects Smith’s Atlantis with another imagined submerged world.