O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
- W.B.Yeats, Among School Children (The Tower, 1928)
Album Leaves and Blossoms was commissioned by Canadian pianist, Margaret Bruce. Yeats' lines, quoted above, may be helpful in suggesting something of the nature of this cycle of seven interconnected pieces.
There are certainly dance-like moments. There are also things which recall for me aspects of Mondrian's tree paintings and sketches made between the latter years of the 19th-Century and 1913. Visually, these trace a circuitous journey from figurative art towards a sort of ideal form - an essence of the thing observed. Yeats, in his poem, explores the interconnection between a Platonic ideal form (like a definition) and what we see and experience. The shifting use of thematic and motivic elements in Timothy Raymond’s work, together with a musical invention that moves between extremes of disruptive fragmentation and expressive continuity, may not be all that far away from what the visual and poetic worlds mentioned invoke.
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Music example (pdf)